Why Hiring Managers Add Interview Rounds

Take a candidate who applies on a Monday, gets screened that night, and by Tuesday morning sits at the top of your shortlist. She's exactly who you were hoping for. The shortlist goes to the hiring manager, whose first free slot is the following Monday. In the meantime she's in four other hiring processes, and those are moving too.

I think this is becoming a common way to lose people on teams that have invested in AI screening, and most of those teams don't have a name for it yet. One 2025 survey found that 61% of candidates who dropped out partway through a hiring process gave "too long between steps" as the main reason.

The investment at the top of the funnel has mostly worked. Teams using AI screening can handle application volumes they never could before, and they get back vetted shortlists where they used to get an inbox full of PDFs. That gain is real.

But when you speed up one step in a sequence, the waiting doesn't go away. It moves to the next step. Say your team used to need four days to get through 200 applications and now needs four hours. The next step is hiring manager review and a first interview, and that hasn't changed at all. Before, the slow screening hid the slow scheduling behind it. Now there's nothing in front of it.

And the wait happens again at every round. If each one takes around six days to schedule, a four-stage process spends close to a month on scheduling alone, time when nothing useful happens on your side while the candidate keeps moving in her other processes. You did the hard part of finding and qualifying her, and then gave her weeks to accept an offer from someone else.

Meanwhile, in a lot of companies, the number of rounds has crept up. Each one gets added for a reason that sounds responsible: another stakeholder wants input, someone asks for a culture-fit conversation that wasn't in the original plan, someone adds a technical screen after round two. As far as I know, the evidence that extra rounds lead to better hires is thin. What they do reliably is give the candidate more time to accept something else.

The odd part is that the teams most likely to add rounds are often the ones that invested most in AI screening. They let the AI handle early filtering, then make up for it by stacking more human judgment at the end. Imagine saving three days at the top and adding twelve in the middle. The pipeline as a whole is barely faster than before.

Why do hiring managers keep adding rounds? My guess is that they don't have enough information to decide sooner. Before the first interview they usually hold a resume and maybe a two-sentence note from the recruiter. So the first interview gets spent on basics that could have been known already. Can this person communicate clearly? Does the resume describe how they actually work, or is it optimistic? When round one is spent on discovery, the real evaluation gets pushed to rounds two and three. That suggests the fix is less about cutting rounds for its own sake and more about sending better information into round one.

That's the part of this I care most about as someone building Asendia. Seen from the candidate's side, what we make is simple: soon after she applies, her phone rings, and she has an actual back-and-forth about the role, with questions that follow from what she just said. What comes out the other end is richer than a resume score: a structured summary of that conversation, with her words quoted directly, ranked against the criteria set for the role. A hiring manager opening the shortlist can read what the candidate actually said when asked about managing a distributed team, or how they'd handle a specific technical situation. Much of what a first interview is normally spent finding out is already written down.

That changes what the first interview is for. It can start from context and go straight to specific follow-up questions. For some candidates a single structured round may be enough, because the earlier conversation already answered what a second round would have been scheduled to ask. The summaries land in the ATS attached to each candidate, so the hiring manager doesn't have to go looking for them in another system. If you're trying to connect pipeline speed to the numbers leadership watches, the post on what recruitment KPIs to track in a post-AI world is a useful companion to this one.

The bottleneck has moved, and the teams that get the most out of AI in recruiting will be the ones that follow it rather than stopping at the first step they sped up. An easy way to see where it went: for your last ten hires, compare the time from application to shortlist with the time from shortlist to first interview. If the second number is bigger, you know which one to work on next.

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