Depends how you count it.
2 group conference calls and a day of interviews in person.
But the day of interviews really was a whole day. Between 9am and 6pm the only break was for lunch, which was delivered to the office, and they were still asking me questions while I was eating.
Luckily I’m pretty confident with interviews, although on that day I had a stomach ache / bloated feeling so I was physically uncomfortable pretty much the whole time.
Two extremes.
Was up for a promotion at work. Was interviewed by six people over four months. Hiring manager created the position for a friend of his and I apparently gummed up the works by applying for it and being very qualified. He kept asking more and more people to interview me, hoping to either discourage me or find some reason to disqualify me.
At the end of four months the leadership team had a come to Jesus meeting with him and told him he had to hire me. I never knew anything about these machinations until after the fact. I got along with him very well, and indeed when he was laid off, I helped him find another job.
Other extreme. I had a job offer in the fall of my senior year that I accepted. Company imploded a few weeks before graduation (front page Wall Street Journal type of implosion) and I graduated jobless in a very tough economy. Sent out several hundred resumes (this is back in the days when you sent out resumes and cover letters in envelopes by mail in response to ads in the Sunday paper) had a few interviews, no offers.
On a Sunday morning, I get a call from an agency. Asks me to come in for an interview that same day. I said sure. I go into a nice CPA firm’s office, the guy in golf clothes asks me to sit in front of a computer and do something in Lotus 1-2-3, and make a few charts in Harvard Graphics. Ten minutes later, he asks if I can start the next day at one of his clients on a temp basis. The client was a Fortune 100 company. By Friday I was writing the SAS code to generate the data going into the Lotus spreadsheets. I was hired permanently after 90 days, and stayed for ten years and six promotions.
You just never know. That CPA firm grew to one of the largest staffing firms in the DC area. I was their second placement.
Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, getting a job with the county was a long process. If your application was approved, you then took a civil service exam. If you passed, you were scheduled for an oral exam in front of a hiring panel. If you passed that, then you could be interviewed by hiring supervisors from whatever areas you expressed interest in. All in all, it took just under 6 months to be hired.
Then they removed the civil service exam portion.
Then they removed the oral exam portion.
Now it’s just application/interview, and suffice it to say the number of qualified new hires has greatly declined. I so wish they would bring back testing for basic logic and computing skills.
On this note:
I work for the State of CA. We still have most of the above: You take the test to see if you’re qualified for the position, then once they have a vacancy in that position you go in and interview for it. Sometimes there’s a second interview, but not always.
In 2014 I took the test for the position I now hold, and did very well. During that year I went on 16 different interviews for different vacancies within the department I was working in. None of them hired me - I’m pretty sure it’s because my boss was a gossip and didn’t get along with me, so they had all heard that I was not a good hire.
The test expires after a year, and when it expired and I would have taken it again, I didn’t - I was burnt out on interviewing, depressed, and figured it was just a waste of time. Then I got the cancer dx and that made me even more unlikely to be hired (or to survive long enough to be , so I didn’t bother at all.
Then a position came up that I really wanted, and that I thought I would do great at. By then I had changed bosses, and my new boss was as supportive as the old one was horrible. She thought I should apply for it, and so I took the test again, passed with flying colors, interviewed twice, and got the job. Yay!
So…the answer is either two, or 18.
I personally have never had more than two. Usually a phone interview with a headhunter, then a face-to-face with the client.
SWMBO recently had 4. The position was created solely to take some of the load off the boss. The last callback was a “shadow the boss for a day” sort of thing. Then the guy changed the job description because he didn’t want to give up part of his job and lose face in the pecking order.
I’ve had as many as 3… for jobs I didn’t get. Phone interview with HR, phone interview with actual manager, in-person interview with manager and team.
Strangely, on all the jobs I actually have had, it’s been one-and-done. A single interview and got the job.