It’s not your imagination. Interview cycles are taking longer. Why? This recent WSJ article addresses the reasons. In a nutshell: “Hiring for the office set is slowing down and employers are getting picky again.” Factors listed that I also have seen accounting for the increased time to land a job:

1. Hard for employers to get approval to hire. Leslie Crowe, a partner at Bain Capital Ventures who works with the 200 mostly tech companies to recruit talent, says “if you’re hiring now, the bar’s really high, because not everyone has a lot of head count for their team.”
2. Hiring freezes. The article reported that candidates have experienced multiple offers falling through, some in the middle of interview process or even at the end as employers freeze jobs. For one candidate, “One company put her through multiple rounds of interviews and test project assignments during a four-month period before withdrawing the job posting.”
3. Intensified competition due to layoffs. Tech has cut almost 200,000 roles in 2023 (and we’re not halfway done with the year) on top of the 165,000 jobs cut in 2022. As a result, competition has grown for the remaining jobs, and it’s harder for white collar workers to stand out. For example, “Hiring managers at AT&T are now often being presented with three to five potential choices, compared with one or two candidates when the labor market was tighter.”
4. Less competition for employers. “[C]ompanies no longer feel the same competitive pressure to quickly snap up talent that they had earlier in the pandemic, leading to drawn-out vetting processes.” Yes, I definitely see my clients taking more time and reverting to their old processes since candidates are less likely to get multiple offers.
5. Employers can make new demands. A year ago, “many companies relaxed their hiring criteria, desperate to get people through the door,” but now they don’t have to. For the Bain Capital Ventures partner, “[a] year ago, amid fierce competition to hire, the IT-infrastructure companies she works with might have been happy to hire someone with a general consulting background to serve in an executive role. Now that they have a deeper talent pool to pick from, she says, she’s seeing companies narrowing their focus to candidates who are steeped in their technical fields and able to speak their language.” Same in the legal world. Now employers don’t have to settle and can hire people who have done that exact job before.
6. Employers are reacting to the past. “As recently as a year ago, employers were competing fiercely to hire talent, dangling five-figure signing bonuses and offering remote work and other perks. During the upheaval of the pandemic, employers saw many job seekers apply for roles who weren’t truly serious about the work, and in a tight labor market, some wound up rushing to hire candidates who didn’t ultimately prove to be a good fit.” The result is “Everybody’s being extra-cautious… A lot of companies have gotten burned.” I also saw an unusual amount of movement in-house, and now employers are doing what they can to avoid rushing/mis-hiring.
7. Better screening for culture. Companies are spending time trying to ensure a good match for company culture, “a luxury that you kind of didn’t have when there were just so many openings” in the past, said Johnny C. Taylor Jr., the CEO of the Society for Human Resource Management.