I took the past six months interviewing to find a place I wanted to work at so went through quite a few companies. My observation was that most places haven't adapted their hiring process successfully to remote interviewing or engineers being in high demand. Even for places that were "desperate" to hire their golden path interview processes were fairly onerous or just really long calendar wise with all their gates.

They pretty much fell into two categories.

The first was person companies who wanted you to commit 1-2 days of in person interviewing after completing the phone screen and a at home test. If you are interviewing at multiple companies and are already employed, this is pretty much a no go unless you are already really enticed or want to work there. Even interviewing at just 3 of those places means taking off so much time from work that you'll either tip off your boss that you're on your way out, or use up all your PTO that you ideally use to have a life and not burn out.

The other category was remote interviewing companies. I observed that they did the same number of interview steps as the in person companies but instead of a day or two gauntlet they schedule an hour here, an hour there, an hour another day. This worked well for interleaving interviews in the regular work day without disrupting your current job, but it meant the full interview cycle would take 3-4 weeks on average as both your schedule and the schedule of their mandatory interview members(hiring manager, heads of various departments, whatever their companies "important" person was, etc) had to align. And that is all before there's interruptions like illness, or getting paged to an on call event.

Every company was doing a minimum of 4 hours and an average of 6 hours of interviews with the common gates being 30 minute phone screen, 45-60 minute take home code interview, 60 minute technical interview with 1-2 engineers, 60 minute system design with 1-2 senior engineers/architects, 60 minute interview with equivalent people in product to make sure you have similar philosophies, and then another 45-60 minutes with the hiring manager. Occasionally companies would also add in an hour with prospective teammates to see if you click, and/or an hour with some specific department they felt it was important to have engineering work directly with.

Its frankly a lot of work when you also have to prep for the typical interview questions that exercise a different skill set than the common job, and are likely doing this gauntlet with multiple companies simultaneously. Its also a high amount of spend on the company side when you add up all the man hours they are using per perspective candidate. My take is that the ghosting seen on both sides is because no one wants to deal with all of this once a match has been found.

It's really on companies to fix this. Candidates aren't clamoring for more and more interview time. When I speak to friends in professions outside of tech they are flabbergasted at the the length and depth of the interview process the tech industry has developed. Bad hires can be a problem but I think our industry has overcorrected for that. I won't believe that companies are truly "desperate" until I start seeing this interview process scale back. Desperate companies would be trying to hire a quickly as possible, not tick off all the checkboxes on a list of tests.