By Lee Flanagan
Veronika did not quit after two interviews. She quit on the phone call announcing a third, when “Christina from HR” told her she would face the same panel again, with more rounds still to come before any decision. “You should know right now today in this moment that I’m speaking to you, I’m not the right fit for your company,” she said, and hung up on a process she had not finished starting. The clip, posted by @therealveronika_ on TikTok and reshared to X, has pulled the internet into a familiar argument: how many interview rounds are too many. That is the wrong question. Veronika did not object to a number. She objected to a repeat.
The Withdrawal Came When Round Three Repeated the Same Panel
Look at the sequence she was given. She had already sat through two interviews, and a third was scheduled with the same panel.
Two more rounds would follow if she cleared that third meeting. Nothing in her account points to a new evaluator, a new task, or a new question the company had not already asked. It offered a rerun. That is the moment she walked, not at some late stage in the abstract, but at the point where the process asked her to prove the same thing twice more before deciding anything.
Her caption generalizes the complaint to a range of three to five interviews, and the comment threads on X ran with the round count as the villain. One user called the process ridiculous outright. Another argued companies should not need that many interviews to decide.
Another commenter offered a counterpoint: her daughter sat through four interviews at each of three companies before landing an administrative job. That comparison does not rescue the volume argument. What made Veronika walk was the same panel returning to reach the same verdict a second time, not the total number of stages.
What Candidates Say They Want Versus What Employers Actually Build
A 2025 candidate poll by Pioneer Search, reported by Daily Dot, found that candidates typically prefer one or two interview stages.
That figure comes from a single recruiting firm’s survey, not a universal law of hiring, and it should not be read as proof that anything beyond that is broken. Indeed’s own framing of multi-stage hiring lists screening interviews, skills assessments, panel interviews, and presentations as distinct tools employers combine, with the exact structure varying by company and role. Employers lean on these stages more for senior or specialized roles, using them to reach a more informed decision.
Put those two facts next to each other and the design logic becomes clear. A screening call, a skills assessment, a panel, and a presentation are supposed to test different things. A candidate who clears a skills assessment still has not shown how they perform live in front of a panel, and a candidate who impresses a panel has not yet shown they can present to stakeholders. That is a legitimate case for length. What Veronika describes, the same panel returning for a third meeting, is different: the same instrument fired twice, dressed up as additional rigor.
Why the ‘Free Consulting’ Complaint Is a Symptom of the Same Flaw
Veronika’s sharper accusation, that companies run multiple interviews to pull free expertise from candidates without paying for it, is easy to dismiss as cynicism. It should not be. One X commenter described being asked to build a test model for a roughly $7,000 role at a video game company, despite having extensive experience, noting there were 30 other applicants and that the company could potentially receive dozens of unpaid models through the process.
Another commenter, with 25 years in their field, said they now avoid interviews built around essay responses or scenario assessments entirely, specifically to keep from handing over free expertise. Our read is that this instinct does not appear at random. It shows up when a stage produces no new decision for the employer and asks the candidate to generate the evidence themselves, again, for free.
A skills assessment that tests something the panel round cannot see stands on its own. A scenario question repeated across three rounds, or a deliverable that doubles as unpaid work product, reads as extraction because, functionally, it is. The complaint about ‘fishing’ is really about whether a stage produces a decision or just produces free labor posing as an interview, not about round count.
The Design Rule Hiring Teams Actually Need
The rounds that survive the least scrutiny when candidates start dropping out are the ones that repeat a decision the panel already made two interviews earlier. None of this argues against multiple stages. Every stage simply must earn its place by testing something the earlier ones could not.
A screen tests baseline fit. A skills assessment tests capability. A panel tests judgment under a live audience. A presentation tests communication to stakeholders. Each of those produces a distinct piece of evidence a hiring manager did not already have. A second pass with the same panel produces nothing new. It costs candidate goodwill and time, and increasingly, it costs the candidate entirely.
If your process cannot say what the third round tests that the first did not, you already know which candidates it will cost you.
Rigor tests something new at each stage. Repetition only tests patience, and patience is a resource candidates are spending less of. A hiring process built from distinct tests will outlast one built from repeats and do-overs, because candidates are already walking away from the second kind.
Original reporting: Yahoo.
Frequently asked questions
Is Veronika’s TikTok story representative of most hiring processes?
No. It is one viral anecdote alongside a poll from a single recruiting firm, Pioneer Search, not a statistically representative dataset on interview practices. Treat both as illustrative of a pattern people recognize, not as a measured norm.
What’s the actual difference between a screening interview and a repeated panel round?
Indeed’s own framing lists screening interviews, skills assessments, panel interviews, and presentations as distinct tools that test different things. A repeated panel round asks the same evaluators the same kind of questions again, which tests nothing new about the candidate.
Does Pioneer Search’s one-or-two-stage preference set a fixed limit on legitimate hiring design?
No. That figure reflects stated preference, not a ceiling on legitimate design. A four or five stage process built from distinct tools, screening, skills assessment, panel, presentation, can still serve candidates well; what fails them is repetition, not length.
Does the daughter’s four-interviews-per-company example undercut the repetition argument?
Not necessarily. The account does not specify what those four rounds tested at each company, so it does not confirm or complicate the repetition argument. What made Veronika quit was a panel repeating its own earlier verdict, not the raw count of stages.
Why did the unpaid test model example resonate with commenters who never applied for that role?
It captured a specific pattern: a company asking many applicants for a deliverable, in that case 30 applicants for a roughly $7,000 role, that can function as unpaid work product rather than as an evaluation stage. That pattern is what fuels the broader complaint about companies seeking free expertise from candidates without paying for it.