&gt; Quick phone call to previous employers can save you tons of money!<p>That may be really dangerous for the ex-employer. I&#x27;d never comment on an ex-employee beyond confirming that he worked on the given dates.<p>&gt; This is cheaper than having directors and executives try to plan around all sorts of interview stages.<p>From my experience, in the first 3-6 month you invest a whole lot in the new employee. He or she is very far from 100% productive and you also need to assign someone for mentoring which also takes company resources. Bad hires are really expensive.<p>In my previous company I was involved a lot in hiring. After CV screening we normally did a 1-2 hour interview (both technical and non-technical) which was (in a positive case) follow by an offer to spend one day working with us. Finally, a permanent contract with 6 month probation time (standard practice in Germany). We had very high success rate. No bad hires on my memory, low fluctuation, very high employee loyality. The company has stellar employee feedback on kununu.com.<p>The downside was that many applicants were really discouraged by our hiring process. Some people were outraged by the fact that they had to actually write code on the interview. Some thought we the purpose of the probation day was to make the work for free. But that&#x27;s OK, we&#x27;ve found a lot of great people anyway.<p>Now I&#x27;m working for a huge corporation. I&#x27;m normally not involved in interviews for permanent positions but I&#x27;m always interviewing when staffing external developers my projects. (We staff developers mainly externally.) It&#x27;s normally 1-hour interview, again both technical as well as non-technical.<p>In any case I can&#x27;t imagine hiring on the basis of a non-technical interview. Bad hires are just way too expensive.