Who does this? Like, who looks in the mirror and says "I'm going to ask this individual - who is already employed elsewhere and doing work daily - to spend their precious free time putting together a 30 minute speech/slides simply for the purposes of entertaining my vanity for a small portion of an already massively-bloated interview"...?
I understand the need to vet a candidate - the desire to see if a person is eager for a position; is willing to do some kind of "homework" to distinguish themselves from other prospects. But there is a line that separates a fair expectation from free, pointless busywork for an unpaid stranger. A 30-minute presentation is not a little task - it's an enormous undertaking. I can vividly recall final projects in grad school that were anchored by 30-minute presentations. It's hours and hours and hours of work.
It feels like all accountability and/or shame has been lost within hiring - that nobody is saying "should we really be doing this to people?" Or, "is this really the best way to evaluate talent?" It's become an obsession with process over personality; the ill-conceived notion that, just because someone can drone on for a half an hour, they won't be chronically absent, or won't doze off during meetings. And that just... isn't the case. Enthusiasm and submission are not the same thing.