If finding a job seems to be taking a long time, it’s not your imagination. With the current economic conditions, companies are slower to hire and often require candidates to come back multiple times. Dawn Klingensmith writes about this trend and how to manage it in her article “How to Survive Multiple Interviews.”

While you have no control over a company’s recruiting process, you do have control over how you react to it. First of all, accept that because so much of work today is collaborative, companies want to make sure that enough people have an opportunity to meet different candidates and see who they’d be able to work with best.

Secondly, realize that there’s actually a lot you can do between interviews to tap into your network and help increase your chances for success. And if you don’t get the job, you’ll walk away with a great consolation prize of stronger connections that can help you in the future:

• Find out if any of your current contacts knows the people you’ve interviewed with or will interview with. This is most easily done if you’ve started to build your network on LinkedIn where you can easily search to see who might be a mutual connection. Your contact might be able to give some insight about your interviewers, or perhaps even be willing to make a recommendation on your behalf.
• Prep for your next interview by asking your interviewers, “Who else is involved in the interviewing process? Is there anything you can tell me about them?” You may learn of a hot button issue you can be sure to address.
• Get a business card from each interviewer so you have full contact information to send a thank you note or email after the interview, as well as for future contact if you don’t get the job.
• Always be upbeat in every interaction with a prospective employer. Never complain that the process is taking too long. No one wants to work with a squeaky wheel, and if you’re this much of a P-I-T-A before you get the job, they’ll worry what you’ll be like after.
• If you don’t get the job, send a note to everyone you interviewed with, thanking them for all of their help and letting them know where you ended up. Include your new business card so you can both keep in touch going forward.

Whenever I interview for a consulting engagement, while my preference would be to win the business as quickly as possible, when I do have to come back to meet more people, I do what I can to take advantage of it. To me, every interaction is another chance to make my case, and more importantly, a potential new connection I could have for the future.