The negative fallout from a generally bad interview policy spread. It was common practice in my client's HR office to have first-year personnel staffers who didn't know disk drives from toasters interrogate senior engineers for an hour or more. But tolerance of administrative hassles has its limits, and smart job candidates balked. Worse, I saw employees who had tendered their resignations interviewing new job candidates. But such egregious errors aren't just made at the staff and middle management levels.
Executive management can be just as guilty of poor judgment as anyone else.
I know of a Marketing Director who, impressed with a top-notch sales person he'd met at a professional function, promptly scheduled her for an interview with the Operations Director. She was summarily dropped from consideration for a sales job because the operations expert concluded she didn't fit his model of a good sales rep. Having recruited and enticed a desirable job candidate to come visit, the company demands that she lay bare her psyche and soul when she walks in the door. It's become altogether too common for HR to administer a battery of personality and aptitude tests to candidates before they even get to see the manager who's supposedly interested in meeting them. After all, HR selected the candidate and invited her in to begin with.