No, it's not normal. But your conclusion that I did this because I don't trust colleagues is mistaken. I did it to figure out how we should shape the hiring process, and so I could relate to the workload and problems that hiring leads face daily.

When you are going to ask your colleagues to tackle a hard problem, and do it in a different way than they did before, it helps if you have actually done it yourself. If that is going to be lots of work, and if it's going to make them vulnerable to trolling on social media, even more so ;)

We started to plan growth a few years back, but seemed to be struggling to get people in. Hiring managers would say "there were no good candidates", which didn't seem right to me. Back then, every hiring manager did things independently, as they saw best. We had very little standard process other than HR onboarding.

When an opportunity came up for me to hire, I adopted a new process, then expanded that to cover a number of roles. Once the process was relatively settled, we picked a small number of senior people, and they ran this process across all roles, with a weekly meeting for us to figure out how to evolve it further.

As you can imagine, this change caused all sorts of angst. Reddit is not the only group that has thoughts :) Many of the same assumptions and opinions expressed here were expressed internally, some resigned. Systemic change in an organisation is painful, this one was particularly hard.

Now, however, most see the benefits.

Our flow of applicants has increased 2-3x. We now have 10-20,000 applicants per month, much more widely representing the world's talent. We are making more appointments than ever in our history. Our weekly meeting is now mostly a celebration of new hires - the whole hiring lead team looks at every new hire's resume and talks over the process of hiring that candidate, then discusses improvements to the process. We are able to analyse the data in our hiring process and look for any indications of bias at each stage, then engage and address it if we have concerns.

You ask if the "CEO is pushing for a candidate" biases the process. You misunderstand my role as hiring lead. I am not pushing for a candidate, I am simply running a few roles as a hiring lead. My job as a hiring lead is to do the initial lightweight screen, then let the process do the work. I don't meet candidates in my roles until the very end of the process, and then only sometimes. I'm running the process to hire for other managers, not for myself. Those managers meet the candidates in late-stage interviews. My job as hiring lead is to make sure we have a good bench of candidates before we make an offer.

Some of the roles I run, which attract the bulk of the applicants, are open-ended roles, for "engineering manager" or "engineering lead". When candidates get to me in those roles, if I think they are great I then send them to a manager who is looking for someone like that. So it has been my great pleasure to give tens of amazingly great candidates to my colleagues for consideration for roles they hadn't even started to hire for. Think how nice that feels, for me and for that manager :)

To circle back to the beginning - beware the trap of "normal". You will never achieve something exceptional if you limit yourself to normal.