Friends husband went through this recently. Many places required 2-3 interviews. Often the first was with the department and the others included higher up people and HR. And sometimes they had tweaked the job description after the initial round of interviews.
Just go in on the assumption that you only narrowly missed out last time, and some other consideration, whether a new opening on a similar team, or the previous candidate not working out, has left you in a good spot. It's been a while since I was doing any hiring, but I often had to pick between people with similar credentials and similarly good interviews. I had to pick somebody, but I would have been happy taking my chances with either candidate and would have been quite relieved if they were still interested when the position opened back up. From the other side, when I first started at my current company, at least four or five of us came on to do the exact same job within a few months of each other, and the difference seems to have come down to how busy the hiring manager was when they first got the budget to bring someone on.
2-3 interviews are common in a lot of professional positions. It's also common to have multiple parts to an interview. There's also a handful of companies that do more than that have have awful interview practices. For IT specifically, there's generally an HR/personality screen, tech screen, and actual interview.
I once had three different recruiters contact me within a month for the same job. Client wanted a unicorn, and kept switching recruiting firms. Wasn't worth the effort I put in between the three recruiters, but your mileage may vary...
Yes. The better the role the more interviews. I had 5 to get in to the job I am right now but it was such a good oportunity that I didn't care. The hiring process took a total of 6 months. Usually you have the first with HR, than one with the manager, than maybe one with the managers boss and other stakeholders
I had four rounds on different days with one of them including 7h of interviews with a dozen people (some paired, some solo). This included a solo interview with someone who interviewed me a year before when I wasn't ready and I was scared he'd recognize me. He didn't, but even if he did I was much better situated in terms of my skills and preparation beforehand. I got the job.
The times I've gone through this it was because of a role that required a combination of niche skills and abilities, combined with loads of applicants.
Often tech jobs have 3 or more interviews over anywhere between a couple of weeks and a couple of months. It really depends on the company, I've seen a hire stretched out over like 3mo before while others happen over the course of a week.