A full day interview is standard. You grant that it's standard, right in the first sentence of your post. But you'll tell anyone who offers you a standard interview to take a hike?
This is symptomatic of a broader problem with HN comment threads on "how to interview" articles: for any given approach to interviewing, the top comment will be a middle-brow dismissal saying, "I would never interview at a place that interviewed that way." For all X.
I would never interview at a place that does whiteboarding. I would never interview at a place that gave me a take-home assignment. I would never interview at a place that asked me to pair-program on a real assignment during the interview (I should get paid for that). I would never interview at a place that asked me to work as contract-to-hire. I would never interview at a place that used HackerRank. I would never interview at a place that looks at Github profiles. I would never interview with a recruiting firm. I would never interview if contacted by a recruiter (instead of the hiring manager).
And apparently some people would refuse to interview at a place that asked you to talk to half a dozen of your potential teammates before offering you the job.
A full day interview is standard. You grant that it's standard, right in the first sentence of your post. But you'll tell anyone who offers you a standard interview to take a hike?
A full day interview (and reasonable) is standard if a company seriously exploring a candidate. A full day interview before a company is seriously exploring a candidate is also standard but it's a standard for the seriously broken and abusive interview process of many organizations today.
The strong reaction people to several of the processes you name comes when those are the first filter a candidate encounters, a qualified person invests a lot of time in them, and then discovers the organization simply wasn't serious to begin with. and they've essentially cheat the person out of significant time. All this gets worse if you encounter many companies doing this in a single job search.
I have never had a full day interview, if it's more than 4 hours for a serious onsite I won't waste my time. They clearly don't appreciate other people's time and are quite frankly wasting theirs. The decision was probably already made before the second cup of coffee anyways.
I absolutely agree with refusing to interview and meet the teammates. All you have to do is rub someone the wrong way for whatever reason, hell they could be in a bad mood because they got cut off on the freeway. Meeting tons of people before an offer is an excellent way to reject great candidates.
I had a company want to do a full day interview, but I had to cut it short and beg off at 1 PM, because they had already blasted past my hotel check-out time, and were in danger of encroaching on the departure time of my return flight--that they booked for me. It was the worst interview experience I have ever had. They declined to arrange for a rental vehicle, so someone from the company had to drive me to and from the hotel, with airport ground transport handled by a shuttle van. Later, they ghosted me, and even tried to stick me with the hotel bill.
The one benefit was the lesson on how to recognize some early warning signs when interviewing.
To name and shame: Tyler Technologies, Eagle Division.
I will say that as someone generally on the hiring side of the equation, I do find that hotel chains and rental agencies drive me CRAZY.
No matter how hard I try and how many times I do it, there is ALWAYS some idiotic hiccup that prevents me from paying for the candidate's room, car, etc. up front. I can give those companies all the credit cards and forms in the world, and somebody in the pipeline will screw it up and demand a couple hundred dollar charge from my candidate. It's so bad that I normally show up to meet the candidate in person simply so that I can use my personal card to ride over the hiccup.
If somebody at HN is looking for a startup idea, here's a "grubby" thing that someone could turn into a service that could browbeat the idiotic hotel companies into submission on.
In this case, it was not the hotel that screwed up.
At the time, I was living in Madison, WI, and they booked my flight out of Milwaukee. With a connection in Madison. No, I couldn't just board the flight in Madison. No, they wouldn't pay for my mileage between Madison and Milwaukee, or for airport parking. The flight out of Milwaukee was cheaper, you see.
The service you are suggesting already exists. It is called a travel agency. Some even specialize in corporate travel. My spouse used to work for one. They lost a lot of business to self-booking sites like Travelocity and Expedia. As a result, some office peons in small and medium businesses are being tasked with booking travel sometimes, and they have no skill or training in handling the idiotic hiccups that will always happen when dealing with the airlines, hotel chains, and vehicle rental chains. Larger businesses tend to have their own travel agents, or contract to a travel agency, especially if their own employees need to travel frequently. If a company cannot provide you with an acceptable travel experience as a candidate, they won't do it as an employee, either.
To contrast, the next travel-required interview booked a reasonable flight, a full-sized rental car, a paid-for hotel, and sent me a per diem check without having to submit any expense receipts. The on-site interview was about 90 minutes, without whiteboarding or coding exercises or pop quizzes or brain teasers, and then they followed up on it and extended an offer. Which I accepted.
It's simple, do a quick interview and hire. Use experience, some technical questions or white boarding. That's how it was done previous to this decade.
Could you elaborate on why it makes sense to have these candidates travel long distances for a full day interview, rather than have them travel nowhere for a shorter interview via video chat?
You can verify their ID. You can show them around the office. You won't discriminate against dial-up modem users. You get the candidate to show that they are serious (flights, hotel, etc.) and you show them that you are serious by paying for it.
There's no silver bullet, that's why companies should offer alternative recruitment paths. Some prefer a take-home assignment, some a face-to-face interview etc.
I should rephrase. I think a full-day interview for a startup is probably going to be a waste of time. After I've already passed a pair of phone interviews for a company with very high comp like Google, Apple, etc? I'd do a full day. For a startup? Meh.
As another poster mentioned, there is no silver bullet. Companies should be flexible and not feel bound to doing it exactly the same way that the big companies do (and even those could be more flexible, but who am I to tell them how to operate) - your startup does not offer the same things or have the same needs, you should not interview the same way. After all, we're expected to be flexible too (take time off work, do phone interviews, hour long onsite interviews, multiple interviews, homework, and/or day long onsites - apparently we're supposed to be happy to do any of those for multiple companies at a time!).
This is symptomatic of a broader problem with HN comment threads on "how to interview" articles: for any given approach to interviewing, the top comment will be a middle-brow dismissal saying, "I would never interview at a place that interviewed that way." For all X.
I would never interview at a place that does whiteboarding. I would never interview at a place that gave me a take-home assignment. I would never interview at a place that asked me to pair-program on a real assignment during the interview (I should get paid for that). I would never interview at a place that asked me to work as contract-to-hire. I would never interview at a place that used HackerRank. I would never interview at a place that looks at Github profiles. I would never interview with a recruiting firm. I would never interview if contacted by a recruiter (instead of the hiring manager).
And apparently some people would refuse to interview at a place that asked you to talk to half a dozen of your potential teammates before offering you the job.
There's just no good approach.