If you’re a developer, you’ve probably felt it: applying for a job is like auditioning for The Voice. Except you don’t get one, two, or three chances: you get five. Five interviews. Plus technical tests. Plus reference checks. And at the end, even if you make it to the final round, there are still elimination rounds you didn’t know existed.
Welcome to modern tech recruiting, where companies have decided that trust is a luxury they can’t afford.
The Voice of Recruitment: An Analogy That Should Make You Uncomfortable
Think about The Voice. Imagine that to compete on the show:
Round 1 (The Blind Auditions) = HR / phone screen You record yourself on video. The recruiter listens, asks generic questions. “Tell me about yourself. Why this company?” You know 90% of candidates are eliminated here. You have to be perfect, enthusiastic, smiling, even if you’ve been job-hunting for three months and quietly falling apart.
Round 2 (The Chairs Turn) = Technical interview with an engineer Now an engineer asks you real questions. Not just “tell me about yourself,” but “code a function in O(n log n) to reverse a nested array of objects.” You have 30 minutes. No Google. No StackOverflow. Just you, your stressed-out brain, and an IDE full of syntax errors.
But wait. You have 12 years of backend development experience in production. You’ve designed systems that serve millions of users. And they’re asking you to manually implement a sorting algorithm that nobody on the team has ever written by hand. The company uses Redis, PostgreSQL, and modern frameworks. No hand-rolled O(n) algorithms in sight.
Round 3 (The Backstage Tests) = Async technical test or live coding session Before the next interview, they send you a test. Or a case study. Or an architecture to design. To be done in 1-2 hours. At home. After your workday. Because yes, you’re probably employed somewhere else and you’re applying at night, like a ghost.
Round 4 (The Battles) = Interview with the manager / tech lead “Tell me about a project where you failed.” “Describe your strengths and weaknesses.” “How would you handle a conflict within a team?” You have to be psychologist, project manager, and soft-skills expert all at once. They’re not just evaluating your tech skills, they’re evaluating your “cultural fit.” That vague term that often just means “would I want to hang out with you at the happy hour.”
Round 5 (The Finals) = Stakeholder panel interview Now there are stakeholders. The CTO, the whole team, the product manager. You’re sitting in front of five people staring you down. It’s theater with an audience. You have to perform. You have to be charismatic. You have to show you’re not just a good developer, but a leader, a mentor, a world-class communicator.
Round 6 (The References) = Calls to former employers And just before they say yes, they call your former bosses. They ask if you really are as good as you claimed in the previous five interviews. As if five rounds weren’t enough to figure that out.
What’s This All For? The Trust Deficit Exposed
Here’s the raw truth: none of these steps exist because they’re good practice. They exist because tech companies trust nothing and no one.
They don’t trust the candidates, they don’t trust their own recruiters, they don’t trust their managers. They think that without five interviews plus tests plus references, they’ll hire an impostor who will blow everything up within a week.
Except… they also have a probationary period. In France, it’s up to eight months. In the US, it’s at-will: you can be fired the same day if it doesn’t work out. But apparently, that’s not enough. They also have to keep the impostor from getting in the door in the first place.
Result? Paranoia-driven filtering: “We’ll eliminate 95% of candidates before hiring one, just to be safe.”
Systematic Over-Evaluation: Asking CTO Questions for a Senior Dev Role
Here’s where the system becomes truly absurd: every company inflates its expectations for the role.
A “Senior Developer” posting ends up demanding competencies that should belong to a CTO or Principal Engineer. Why?
C-Suite Questions for an IC Role
You sit across from a senior engineer who asks:
- “How would you architect a system for 100 million users?”
- “Walk me through the trade-offs between monolithic and microservices architecture”
- “How would you deploy this across three continents with sub-100ms latency?”
- “How have you made tech stack decisions in your previous projects?”
But the job? It’s a normal developer role. You’re going to code features. Integrate APIs. Maintain code. Write tests.
The interviewer unconsciously imagines they’re hiring their own replacement. They impose their personal standards. They want a CTO, but they can only pay a Senior Dev salary.
Result: you have to pretend to know things you’ll never use. You improvise answers to questions irrelevant to the actual job. And you’re judged against criteria that appear nowhere in the job description.
Algorithm Tests That Exist Nowhere in Real Work
Then there are the tests. The famous algorithm tests.
“Implement a BFS to find the shortest path in an unweighted graph.”
“Solve the newsvendor problem with O(n) space and O(n log n) time complexity.”
“Implement a Union-Find data structure with path compression.”
Honestly? 99% of developers writing code every day will never write any of this.
Your daily stack: JavaScript/TypeScript/Python. You use existing libraries. You call Array.sort() or sorted(). Sorting algorithms? Implemented in O(n log n) by the stdlib. Union-Find? Never used.
But you’re tested on it. Why? Because companies confuse “someone who can learn” with “someone who has memorized classical data structures.” It’s like testing an electrical engineer’s ability to build a transistor from raw silicon, just to verify they understand how circuits work.
And here’s the worst part: it’s a test that rewards preparation, not intelligence. Someone who’s done 100 LeetCode problems last month will pass. A brilliant developer who hasn’t had time to prep will fail. You’re testing cramming ability, not actual competence.
Progressive Over-Evaluation: Each Round Raises the Bar
The most insidious part? The progressive inflation of expectations.
Round 2: “You got O(n log n)? Good, now explain the space complexity too and prove it’s optimal.”
Round 3: “Okay, you’ve got the algorithm. Now here’s a case study. Don’t just code: think about scalability, maintainability, testability, and design an architecture that handles 10,000 requests per second.”
Round 4: “Great, you’ve got the architecture. Now tell me how you’d take it to production. Monitoring? Logging? Alerting? How do you debug a production issue at 3am?”
Round 5: “Excellent. Now tell me how you’d lead a team. You’ve got three junior devs and an intern, and you need to ship a complicated feature in two weeks. Walk me through your approach.”
At each step, the requirements escalate. And at each step, they’re evaluating a completely different profile:
- Round 2 = A senior individual contributor
- Round 3 = A Solutions Architect
- Round 4 = An Ops/SRE
- Round 5 = A CTO / Tech Lead
But it’s one single job! Imagine if a nursing candidate were asked to give injections (Round 2), diagnose diseases (Round 3), manage a hospital ward (Round 4), and define national health policy (Round 5)?
It’s absurd. It’s exactly what happens in tech recruiting.
The Human Cost: The Exhausted Athlete
Now come back to The Voice. You’re a talented candidate. A musician, a singer, a composer. You’re auditioning because it’s an incredible opportunity.
But the process demands that you:
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Give 1000% every single time. No “let’s see how this one goes.” Every stage requires you to be at your peak. Synthesizing your best projects. Rehearsing answers to trick questions. Getting mentally prepared. It’s exhausting.
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Stay positive. Because the slightest hint of frustration, any moment where you let on that the process is wearing you down, and you’re out. Recruiters want “motivated” people. Someone who can make it seem normal to spend 8 hours on interviews for a €50k salary.
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Repeat this for every company. Every week, a new company, a new set of five interviews. You’re in a permanent competition. Applying everywhere, preparing everywhere, failing everywhere. And each time, you have to summon the energy all over again.
It’s inhumane. It’s what we ask of Olympic athletes, not people who just want to code and earn a living.
The Flaws of the Process: The Voice Shows Us
The Voice at least has the honesty to be a show. Everyone knows it’s dramatized, that cameras are rolling, that it’s entertainment. Contestants know what they’re signing up for.
But tech recruiting? It claims to be objective. Rational. Skill-based.
Except in reality:
1. Objectivity is an illusion Supposedly “objective” technical tests actually measure your ability to perform a technical test under stress, not your ability to code day-to-day. A brilliant developer who freezes under pressure will fail. A mediocre developer who memorized LeetCode patterns will pass. Where’s the objectivity?
2. “Cultural fit” is often code for “looks like me” When an interview evaluates “cultural fit,” it’s often really testing: “would I be friends with you?” “would you come to happy hour?” “would you find the same memes funny?” It’s confirmation bias dressed up as competence. And it systematically filters out introverts, neurodivergent people, immigrants, women, parents.
3. Performance fatigue creates under-representation The longer the process, the more it favors candidates who have the time and energy to prepare. Single parents working full-time who can’t do LeetCode at night? Out. Career-changers who have to justify every choice? Out. People who succeeded in small companies without big brand names? Out.
4. References are a privilege chain If you need to call my former boss to verify I’m good, you’re assuming I had former bosses at “good” companies. A fresh graduate? No references. An immigrant who worked abroad? Their references don’t speak the language. A self-taught developer who just completed a bootcamp? No track record. The process structurally filters out non-conventional profiles.
5. Profile over-evaluation Every company recruits for the profile they wish they could have rather than the one they actually need. A Senior Dev role ends up demanding Principal Engineer expertise. Complex algorithm tests for a position that will never use them. CTO-level system design questions for a role where you’ll just be shipping features. Result? 90% of candidates are either over-qualified or rejected for not having “CTO experience.” And the few who do get hired end up frustrated: they played a role during recruiting that reality can’t live up to.
The Trap of Five Interviews
Here’s what I can’t understand: if you can already identify a good candidate in three well-structured interviews, why do five?
The answer reveals the real disease: fear of being wrong. Tech companies, supposedly the bastions of innovation and risk-taking, are absolutely terrified of hiring the wrong person.
And here lies the ultimate irony: by trying to avoid the risk of hiring “the wrong person,” you guarantee homogeneous teams with no diversity, no fresh perspectives, no creativity. You eliminate the noise that could become signal. You kill innovation before it even starts.
What Have You Actually Built?
With this process, tech companies have created a job market that:
- Burns out the good candidates. Brilliant people get exhausted after three or four elimination processes and stop applying.
- Advantages system survivors. Those who already have everything: a network, a personal brand, innate confidence. Everyone else? Discouraged.
- Misses hidden talent. All the brilliant developers who could have been excellent with a little training, good onboarding, and support? Never hired.
- Creates a culture of distrust. If the hiring process is a battle, the internal culture will be too.
The Simple Question to Ask Yourself
Before adding that fifth interview, ask yourself one simple question: “Does this step genuinely help me make a better decision, or is it just institutionalized paranoia?”
Because if you have a probationary period, solid onboarding, and you invest in your team’s growth, you don’t need five interviews. You need enough interviews to verify that a person:
- Can code (or can learn)
- Isn’t a sociopath
- Is passionate about the domain
- Can communicate
That’s it. The first three rounds cover it. The fourth starts to look like paranoia. The fifth? It’s just theater.
The Real Conversation We Need to Have
The real question for companies: do you want to hire the best candidate, or the candidate with the most time to dedicate to your tests?
Because those are two very different things.
When you run five interviews, you’re not optimizing for skill. You’re optimizing for availability, self-confidence, and access to resources for preparation. And you’re systematically eliminating people who carry too much responsibility, have too little privilege, or have too little energy to play the game.
Conclusion: Time to Change
It comes down to one simple thing: trust.
Not in the perfect hire (it doesn’t exist). Not in the absence of risk (there always will be). But in your ability to welcome someone, train them, and let them become excellent.
Tech companies spend 40 hours filtering a candidate. Then 0 hours integrating them properly. Onboarding them. Giving them the tools to succeed. They should flip that.
Instead of asking a Senior Dev CTO-level questions, ask the questions that actually matter:
- “Can you learn fast?”
- “Do you know how you learn best?”
- “What genuinely motivates you?”
- “Are you willing to be honest when you don’t know something?”
No BFS, no Union-Find, no five rounds. Just an honest conversation with someone you intend to train and develop.
Then? Give them a real chance. Not a probationary period where everyone secretly hopes they quit. A real onboarding, clear cycles, achievable goals, and time.
The best teams in the world aren’t made up of people who already had it all figured out on day one. They’re made up of people someone took the time to develop.
Tech recruiting needs to stop imitating The Voice and start imitating how real organizations build talent.