7 was at a large enterprise software company. I don’t remember exactly how many phone screenings they did, but it was less than 20. I still thought it was too many.

Like I said, I think if you have to interview that many, your filtering process is really broken further up the pipeline. You don’t know what you want, what the job really is, the or application process isn’t properly structured.

Interviewing large numbers of people is also a huge liability unless you’re extremely consistent and well-documented in your hiring process (something which I’ve found to rarely be the case).