> eminently reasonable

Companies feel like they have no choice, for two reasons:

1. Jurisdictions where workers must give minimum notice periods before leaving their prior employer - the worker accepts a competing offer, gives notice, waits out the notice period, then starts. And many workers often ask for additional unpaid time between jobs before starting (since no vacation days have been accrued yet at the new job).

2. Hiring happens by committee. In most companies, job candidates must be interviewed by, at the absolute minimum, an HR screener, the hiring manager, and the hiring skip-level; and usually also by people who will be peer teammates, plus an HR "culture" interview. If you need to pass a committee of 3-6 people, interviews must be scheduled with each member of the committee; at one committee member per week, that is 3-6 weeks.

6 weeks (1.5 months) plus background checks plus getting pay packages approved plus 30 day notice periods plus two weeks unpaid vacation is, yes, a multiple month endeavor at minimum to fill a role. The only way to fill a role within a week is to grant full hiring autonomy to the hiring manager and only hire people who are currently unemployed (and therefore have no notice period or desire to take more unpaid time before starting), which in most companies beyond early startup size, is a complete non-starter.

We are at the moment hiring for a L3 (no fresh graduate but someone with 3-5 years of experience). The role has been open for two months now (it was a backfill). I personally am in charge of the technical screen which is the second interview after the hiring manager. I am already getting a filtered set of candidates after the recruiter and the hiring manager review candidates. Of the 5 that have come my way, I’ve said yes to 1 person and 1 as a yes, pending another technical screen. We are not even wanting an exact match, nor are we expecting cure for cancer. Yes there are a lot of people looking for jobs but you don’t realize how many candidates are just not what their resumes portray. It takes forever to get someone competent in the pipeline and even then, you know nothing about their work ethic. The reason the pipeline is slow is because the candidate pool is flooded with over the top resumes that are not backed by actual talent and once you hire a wrong candidate it is extremely difficult to fire them, even with at will employment contracts.

Any manager will tell you, they’d rather not go through the long hiring process.

True. But if your job is HR taking a long time to hire people and maintaining a high level of turnover is probably good for your job security. I don't think it is overt, but I have noticed that large orgs have a lot of HR process, small companies just try hard to maintain staff.

Most tech companies have a: - recruiter screen - tech screen - multiple interviews during an "onsite" round

Job is posted. You apply along with hundreds of other people. The recruiter/hiring manager needs to spend some time sifting through them along with juggling all the other tasks they have going on. Let's say that this takes 1-2 weeks. Some places may let the opening sit longer to get more applicants.

Several candidates are identified as possible fits. Recruiter reaches out to them to schedule the recruiter screen. Schedules need to line up. This likely takes 1-2 weeks until the recruiter screen happens.

The recruiter needs to schedule the tech screen after a successful recruiter screen. Again, schedules need to line up. This could take another 1-2 weeks.

Feedback needs to be submitted and then the onsite round is scheduled. This could take another 1-2 weeks.

The onsite round will have multiple interviewers. This means more people to collect feedback from which likely increases delays in getting that. A debrief is normally scheduled with everyone who interviewed them. But let's say one week to gather this and make a decision.

An offer is made. It takes some time to prepare and get sign off. There will be time to discuss with the recruiter to explain the details, plus some time needed for negotiation and thinking it over. This could be another 1-2 weeks.

Additionally, some candidates may want to ask for more time during these phases in order to prepare better or align their schedules. This pushes back the process for all other candidates if the company is hiring for a specific job in order to give all candidates a fair assessment against the pool.

Adding this all up, we arrive at 6-10 weeks.

A lot of it has to do with how long it takes to find the right candidate. As someone who has been involved in a lot of hiring over the last 20 years, I can say there's been a huge shift within the last couple of years and open reqs get 10-25x the number of applicants, which instead of increasing choice in a positive way has just resulted in the average applicant quality decreasing. That means recruiters and hiring managers spend a LOT more time vetting and also invest in parallel candidates to try to hedge, because so many candidates applying are legitimately unqualified.

It may sound like I'm blaming candidates, and sometimes it might be fair to, but this is also a problem caused by companies not investing in training and hiring junior level employees, which means that people who are unqualified feel forced to apply for more senior roles, as those are the only roles hiring. It's honestly shocking how many candidates I've interviewed in my career who don't even meet the basic bar for the role they've applied for, and are essentially just hoping to get lucky and snag a high-paying tech job even if it ultimately results in them being terminated, they can collect a check for 3-9 months without delivering.

Mass applications, AI cheating, fraudulent representation (e.g. saying you are person X but are actually interviewing on behalf of person X who you are not), lying on resumes and in screeners, and even nation state attacks on hiring (see North Korea trying to farm tech jobs for money to get around sanctions), it's not great on the hiring side either.

Hiring the wrong person in corporate roles is very, very, very expensive. New hires are expected to be unproductive right out the gate, and it's hard to measure productivity in general, so you can easily end up in scenarios where it takes months to notice there's an issue and a year or more before you can get the person back out the door. So you really do have to double and triple check that a prospective hire is the right choice.

It can move faster than months, of course, when everyone's willing to prioritize it. But as anyone who's worked in hiring can tell you, the set of people who want hiring to move faster is much larger than the set of people who are willing to accept inconvenient interviews and fill out their feedback promptly.