Companies these days expend way too much energy interviewing peopleThe only thing that wastes more time than interviews is hiring the wrong person. Many companies take interviewing seriously, my company meets before each interview to go over the candidate's resume and discuss what we each want to talk to the candidate about. Then we have a debrief after the interview. Anyone can veto a candidate for any reason and only candidates that get a majority vote to proceed move on to the next step. If everyone is lukewarm on the candidate, then he doesn't move to the next step.
Interviews don't guarantee that you'll hire the right person, but do help screen out the wrong people -- like bad personality fit, insufficient knowledge of what they claim to know, etc
Good thing too, a month later the entire division was shut down.
Perhaps your experience at a failing division was not typical at this company