From my experience, those extra rounds and puzzles don't improve the quality of hires. But they:
1. Create objective consensus. In a small company, you can hire based on intuition - talking to a candidate once (and ideally seeing any kind of work sample) are mostly sufficient for me right now. In larger organisations, I had to _defend_ hiring decisions, so you need to create evidence of objectivity.
2. Filter a prohibitively long list of candidates. Gotta have _some_ way to do it, even though I'd argue selecting for those most likely to hang in there for a long hiring process isn't the best way.
3. Create a (usually faux) narrative that you rigourously assess candidates and therefore only the best work with you.
Now, I won't say there aren't some benefits to more exposure to a candidate and their work, whatever it is. But in my experience, extensive hiring processes are really more about the stuff I listed above, even if nobody involved would think of it that way.
1. Create objective consensus. In a small company, you can hire based on intuition - talking to a candidate once (and ideally seeing any kind of work sample) are mostly sufficient for me right now. In larger organisations, I had to _defend_ hiring decisions, so you need to create evidence of objectivity.
2. Filter a prohibitively long list of candidates. Gotta have _some_ way to do it, even though I'd argue selecting for those most likely to hang in there for a long hiring process isn't the best way.
3. Create a (usually faux) narrative that you rigourously assess candidates and therefore only the best work with you.
Now, I won't say there aren't some benefits to more exposure to a candidate and their work, whatever it is. But in my experience, extensive hiring processes are really more about the stuff I listed above, even if nobody involved would think of it that way.