To Land a Job Here, It's a 15-Hour Interview

Considering a job at Appster? Sure! Just send in your résumé, spend an average of 15 hours interviewing, and score in the top 5% worldwide on competency tests, and maybe you'll get hired. Fortune reports the Australian app-development company re-engineered its approach after calculating that only about half its hires ended up working out. Fast Company details the current hiring process: It all begins with the company imagining an ideal hire. Then, an HR person sifts through résumés and holds phone interviews; some 10% to 20% of applicants will be sent on to the next step. Some 70% of those people will then be cut in competency tests that require them to score in that top 5% bracket, co-founder Josiah Humphrey tells Fast Company. Next is a half-day interview, followed by an additional three-to-five-hour one.

In that second meeting, one of the two interviewers spends the time examining your body language. And you might be asked to come in and do a trial workday. Of course, the team is also investigating your references behind the scenes, and the process involves about 22 hours of work for them per candidate. "You start seeing glimmers of people's personalities they can't hide, things you would never be able to see in a traditional job interview," co-founder Mark McDonald told Business Insider in November. The goal, he says, is to ensure hires (50 of its 130 employees joined in the past three months) stay on for the long haul, and about 90% now do. A common thread shared by those who get the job? The ability to freely and extensively talk about one's career; Fortune reports this tends to indicate the candidate is qualified and has no skeletons in his or her employment closet. (Read a less intense, more uplifting job interview story.)