A culture fit starts with the hiring process

Two weeks ago I was talking to a friend about our hiring process. And how a candidate, after a first very good conversation, told me he did not want to go through our hiring process. Too long, too much time invested, too many people involved. He just wanted an offer after a short hiring interview and this initial short conversation. It made me think, are we doing it the wrong way? But after reflecting on it, I decided I do not want to change a thing about how we hire.

At Xebia, the company where I work, the process is thorough (or long as some call it). Colleagues at other companies hear about it and react the same way every time: how do you expect anyone to sign up for that? People will not do that. And in a way, they are right. A lot of people do not. We lose plenty of good candidates simply because they do not want to invest the time.

But the ones who make it through are a different story entirely.

What a long process actually filters for

Sourcing is the easy part, and it looks like everyone else’s. Some candidates come through our network, some we find cold, some come through a vacancy. The real filtering starts after that.

First there is a CV and motivation screen, where language, relocation, or basic technical fit already thins the pool. Then comes an introduction call that has almost nothing to do with skills. We talk about the person: what drives them, what they want out of their career, how their life outside work looks. We are checking for cultural fit before we check for anything else.

Only after that do we get technical. A ninety-minute, free-format conversation with two experts, no script, just a whiteboard and a candidate asked to think out loud, draw, brainstorm, defend an idea under gentle pressure. Then an assessment: build something, present it, and take another long look at soft skills alongside the technical ones. We make the offer directly afterward, while the conversation is still fresh.

Six people, multiple hours, several rounds. On paper it looks like overkill. In practice it is a series of filters, each one testing something a CV cannot show you.

Why the drop-off is the point

Here is the part that surprises people: a high drop-off rate is doing useful work. The candidates who walk away because the process feels too long are self-selecting out, and that self-selection is information, not lost opportunity.

The ones who make it through have already decided, multiple times, that this is worth the effort. Even the candidates that do not finish succesfully usually thank us for the great learning they had during the process. That feedback is valuable for us as well. And those who make it? They are a direct fit in the group. Nobody inside the company doubts whether a new colleague belongs there, because everybody went through the same six or eight hours to get in. That shared experience builds a baseline of trust before day one even starts.

It shows up with customers too. Our consultants talk openly about the process they went through, and clients notice. They are not hiring a name off a CV, they are hiring someone who cleared a bar that took real effort to clear. That is a different kind of confidence than a two-round interview loop provides.

The trade-off nobody wants to say out loud

None of this is free. Six people spending multiple hours per candidate is a real cost, and it is a cost you pay whether or not the candidate ends up on the payroll. On the candidate’s side, the investment is just as real: an afternoon, an evening, a Saturday, spent on a process that might end in a no.

Most companies look at that cost and decide to shorten the funnel instead. Fewer rounds, faster decisions, less friction for candidates in a tight market. That is a legitimate choice. But it quietly moves the filtering from before the hire to after it, and after-the-hire filtering shows up as attrition, as culture mismatches discovered three months in, as the quiet erosion of trust when a new hire turns out not to share the same standards as everyone else.

A short process does not remove the need to filter. It just relocates the cost, and hands the bill to the team that has to onboard, correct, or eventually part ways with someone who should never have made it through.

I still think about that candidate who walked away. He was probably right that our process asked too much of him. But the people who did not walk away are the reason the culture holds together as well as it does. A hiring process that takes six hours and loses good people along the way is not a broken funnel. It is a culture, deciding in advance who gets to shape it.