Follow-Up After Interview
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@DustinB3403 said in Follow-Up After Interview:
@Fredtx You can certainly followup and ask if you're still being considered, but honestly if jobs aren't super difficult to find in your area, I'd just move on.
I live in the Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas area and there seems to be a lot of companies hiring right now. It just gets a little frustrating when you invest so much time (phone interview, video conference, onsite interview). If I don't get the position it definitely did help me with getting better at this stuff.
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@IRJ said in Follow-Up After Interview:
@Fredtx said in Follow-Up After Interview:
Yea, that makes sense. I wasn't sure if it would give an impression that I wasn't interested if I didn't follow up.
Also, after I interviewed with operations managers/etc I immediately interviewed with the HR manager. HR did tell me she's sure that I'm actively applying for other companies and to have patience as it's a long process for their hiring. I'm still going to actively apply at other places though. If I've already been eliminated I would really like to know if there was anything wrong I did so it can help me with future interviews.
Assume the job isnt in the bag until offer is in hand. I have been lead on before, and learned my lesson. Like you said, keep applying and keep playing your cards. Having more than one offer in hand is very good for you of course
so just keep going.Yes very true. I've been job searching mostly in Linkedin and some on Indeed.
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@Fredtx said in Follow-Up After Interview:
Yea, that makes sense. I wasn't sure if it would give an impression that I wasn't interested if I didn't follow up.
Also, after I interviewed with operations managers/etc I immediately interviewed with the HR manager. HR did tell me she's sure that I'm actively applying for other companies and to have patience as it's a long process for their hiring. I'm still going to actively apply at other places though. If I've already been eliminated I would really like to know if there was anything wrong I did so it can help me with future interviews.
Some companies need ages to respond. One example is a well known European aviation company: Can take them three or four months to get back to you. There is no "one-rule-for-all"-thing here. Large enterprises tend to react slower, but the same can be true for a 50 ppl shop. I've also seen it the other way around where a very large company sent me a contract after a few days.
Be a little more patient and call them in one or two weeks.
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@thwr This is indeed a European company with branches in U.S, Canada, and Mexico. I will still continue to seek other opportunities as they come along with keeping my patience.
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@Fredtx said in Follow-Up After Interview:
Yea, that makes sense. I wasn't sure if it would give an impression that I wasn't interested if I didn't follow up.
Also, after I interviewed with operations managers/etc I immediately interviewed with the HR manager. HR did tell me she's sure that I'm actively applying for other companies and to have patience as it's a long process for their hiring. I'm still going to actively apply at other places though. If I've already been eliminated I would really like to know if there was anything wrong I did so it can help me with future interviews.
You should always remember the names of the people in an interview and e-mail them a thank you after the meeting imo. It's not a check-in but it acknowledges that you remember their names and puts a personal touch to it. Not required, but it's nice.
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@IRJ said in Follow-Up After Interview:
@Fredtx said in Follow-Up After Interview:
What is a decent amount of time for a candidate to follow up with a company they had an onsite interview with?
I would say never. Why does the candidate need to follow up with the company?
Same here, I'm not sure of a purpose for this.
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@Dashrender said in Follow-Up After Interview:
yeah - if they like you -they'll call you - if they don't call you, then they probably want someone else.
You calling them looks desperate, and puts them in a position of power.
Right, there is no situation where you'd call them and they'd be like "we wanted to hire you, but were just waiting for you to ask us, again."
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@Fredtx said in Follow-Up After Interview:
Yea, that makes sense. I wasn't sure if it would give an impression that I wasn't interested if I didn't follow up.
Definitely not. We do have people follow up with us from time to time, but normally months later to ask if there was a potential at a different opening. That's a little different if it is a company small enough that you might have missed one opportunity but not failed the interview.
But when we do that, we also tell people that they passed and to keep in touch for future openings because we don't want them getting the wrong impression.
Our last three hires were all that way, in fact. They all passed initial interview but we didn't have enough slots for them all. So we hired them in nearly random order because they were all good enough (we tried to be strategic based on skill set.)
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@Fredtx said in Follow-Up After Interview:
HR did tell me she's sure that I'm actively applying for other companies and to have patience as it's a long process for their hiring.
That right there, is how companies fail the reverse interview. Two things to remember....
- This is BS because it is the company's CHOICE to have the process take a long time. No outside force makes them bad at this. This is HR telling you now that good hiring practices aren't important to this company. They are telling you to run away now, it's not a good place to work in a politically correct way.
- Interviews go two ways and there is no better insight into the company than their interview process, it's the one thing about their company that they can't fake. Nothing that they show or claim matters as much as the process by which they interview. So what you just learned about this company is that either they aren't interested in you, or they aren't interested in good hiring (or both.)
Remember, healthy companies generally hire on the spot or same day. If we are doing interviews and find someone we want, we never let them go to bed wondering if they are getting an offer. Never.
Longest "good job" I ever had to wait on was like three hours. They made the offer after I had left, but before I got home.
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@Fredtx said in Follow-Up After Interview:
@DustinB3403 said in Follow-Up After Interview:
@Fredtx You can certainly followup and ask if you're still being considered, but honestly if jobs aren't super difficult to find in your area, I'd just move on.
I live in the Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas area and there seems to be a lot of companies hiring right now. It just gets a little frustrating when you invest so much time (phone interview, video conference, onsite interview). If I don't get the position it definitely did help me with getting better at this stuff.
That's why you do what you can to minimize the investment. To some degree you can't, but companies want you to feel vested in the position and will do this to make you willing to wait longer for an offer, and to accept less when you get it. You have to mentally battle this because it is designed to wear you down.
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@thwr said in Follow-Up After Interview:
Large enterprises tend to react slower
I found the opposite. Big ones are the most likely to be "on the spot" and "even if there is no specific opening" because they have the resources to do so and can't let a good person walk out the door. They know that the cost of interviewing is staggering and that missing a good candidate because you wanted, even an hour, is a killer to profits.
Crappy companies of any size will be bad at this. Being crappy makes them bad at it, doing it makes them crappy. It's a cycle.
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@thwr said in Follow-Up After Interview:
One example is a well known European aviation company: Can take them three or four months to get back to you.
Perfect example. by definition, no one but desperate, otherwise unemployable people work there. There really aren't any aviation companies of any size out there that are known as good places to work. Europe is like the US, these companies are broadly corrupt and often a pretty serious embarrassment to work at. They way poorly, treat workers terribly, are shameful to say you get paid by, and generally only exist because they bribe government officials. They are the saddest, most depressing, most unprofessional places to have to work. Boeing, Lockheed, Airbus, etc. come to mind as big examples of places that are huge, but not because they are good companies, good places to work, and you'd be ashamed if they were on your resume. I worked at Lockheed for one week and feel dirty having stayed that long, my professional integrity won't let me go back. I'd have to consider myself a traitor to my country to work there, and I mean that. Not to mention a traitor to my profession.
Like anything, if you want "any" job, then being desperate opens a few extra door. But if you want a good job, being desperate makes it way harder to get hired.
It's not that crappy companies can't hire, it's that they can't get any number of good people. So you have to work with larger pools and wildly non-competitive people.
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@thwr said in Follow-Up After Interview:
Be a little more patient and call them in one or two weeks.
If you feel the urge to do this, I encourage you to instead "black list them" and don't consider an offer even if they make it. Patience and call backs might get you the job, but they also essentially guarantee that you will be sorry that you got it.
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@scottalanmiller said in Follow-Up After Interview:
@thwr said in Follow-Up After Interview:
Large enterprises tend to react slower
I found the opposite. Big ones are the most likely to be "on the spot" and "even if there is no specific opening" because they have the resources to do so and can't let a good person walk out the door. They know that the cost of interviewing is staggering and that missing a good candidate because you wanted, even an hour, is a killer to profits.
Crappy companies of any size will be bad at this. Being crappy makes them bad at it, doing it makes them crappy. It's a cycle.
There are exceptions. The company I'm talking about is great and ppl love to work there. Payment is great, pension is great, you got great career options... I could go on like this for quiet some time. But you have to "survive" HR.
Long story short: The world isn't just black and white.
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@scottalanmiller said in Follow-Up After Interview:
@thwr said in Follow-Up After Interview:
One example is a well known European aviation company: Can take them three or four months to get back to you.
Perfect example. by definition, no one but desperate, otherwise unemployable people work there.
That's simply not true
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I actually totally forgot about an interview I had with a place and they called me, and was like "hey sorry are you showing up?"
To which I of course replied, "i'm totally sorry, I forgot about this and can't make it"
They rescheduled and I had a great interview.
Desperation never works.
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@Fredtx said in Follow-Up After Interview:
@thwr This is indeed a European company with branches in U.S, Canada, and Mexico. I will still continue to seek other opportunities as they come along with keeping my patience.
European hiring tends to be far worse. I prefer Europe to the US in nearly every aspect, but healthy large companies isn't one of them. European companies tend to be even more bloated and take professionalism less seriously. There is a reason that pay scales tend to be lower. There are great companies everywhere, and bad ones everywhere. The US tends to work you way harder, Europe tends to have better benefits. But when it comes to "being allowed to act professionally and work to the best of your ability and do your job rather than playing politics", the US is a leader. We take "taking our jobs seriously" in a way that pretty much only Mexico mirrors.
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@thwr said in Follow-Up After Interview:
@scottalanmiller said in Follow-Up After Interview:
@thwr said in Follow-Up After Interview:
One example is a well known European aviation company: Can take them three or four months to get back to you.
Perfect example. by definition, no one but desperate, otherwise unemployable people work there.
That's simply not true
How is it not true? If people are willing to accept work after waiting for months, that alone could define them as desperate. The employer didn't pass the loosest of interviews, and yet they accept the job anyway. There is very, very little more than a company could do to make it crystal clear that hiring good people is not in any way a priority. Why would anyone not desperate want to work in a company where they know everyone else is all people who went through that process, had the company fail so totally in its hiring, and then decided to take the job anyway?
It's not just that the company failed its part of the interview. But it also tells you that everyone else is someone you would question wanting to have has your coworkers. Not that they aren't nice people, but that they are all people willing to accept such a staggeringly bad job offer.
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@thwr said in Follow-Up After Interview:
There are exceptions. The company I'm talking about is great and ppl love to work there. Payment is great, pension is great, you got great career options... I could go on like this for quiet some time. But you have to "survive" HR.
Ah, but you leave out one key thing: the job. Sure, the pay has to be great, the pensions have to be great, because how would they hire otherwise?
And if you look at some of the worst places to work in America, take Wegmans Family Markets in NY as an example, they constantly rank as a "Top 3 Places to Work in America." Yet if you go there, it's a pit of despair. How can this be?
Because... they literally only hire the dregs, the desperate. Every single employee that they have is thankful that someone employed them because they are otherwise mostly unemployable. It's an insanely depressing place to work. It's unprofessional, it's incompetent, it's almost abusive at times. Yet people, being thankful that they have A job, constantly rank it as a place that they love to work, because the alternative is starvation, not because the alternative [to them] is another job.
It's easy to say that the other benefits are there. But we didn't say that they weren't. What I said was that it's a bad job that hires a pool of desperate people. People who are likely to struggle finding other work, people who are willing to work with a less than middling base of professionals, people who were on the market unable to find an acceptable job for months and jumped at a job that doesn't care about who they hire.
No matter how much they try to make up for it, it's hard to claim that the people that they hire aren't desperate, because by definition, accepting the job requires a level of desperation.
Don't get me wrong, everyone is desperate sometimes. It's not some condemnation of those people. But an employer that is intentionally hiring people in that state, and only in that state, is designed around getting people that have little ability to leave, and are going to be pretty much the bottom of the barrel. Good people will sneak through sometimes, because even good people are sometimes desperate. But there is a big difference between being desperate once in a while, and building a hiring practice to filter out anyone who isn't.
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@thwr said in Follow-Up After Interview:
Long story short: The world isn't just black and white.
If life has taught me anything, it's that it is way more black and white than people like to think. Often, when we think things aren't black and white, it's that there's something else we are missing.
For example, I'd put dollars to donuts that you were expecting that a pool of only desperate people would find the job to be unsatisfactory, not be paid well, or not have good benefits. But in reality, we expect a place that only hires desperate people to actually have people like it. Why? Because instead of being the one desperate person in a place full of non-desperate people, they are with others in the same boat, it makes them feel better. The expectations for performance are low, so if you don't like what you do or aren't good at it, no one is really expecting you to be good, they went so far out of their way to make sure the best people weren't available when they made an offer.
This is where things get interesting. Desperate or low performing people, or those that don't like their careers, are going to love shops like this, or government work in the US, for example. It's designed around that. But people who love their careers, excel at them, want to do a good job will think that those jobs sound like hell.
I think it really is black and white, the people that are taking those jobs are desperate (or looking to be in a desperate pool so that it is extra easy to appear competent.) It's not for top performers, it's not even for middling performers. It's a place for the "just getting by". And by having all of the "just getting by" in one place, it's easy to design a company around that to make those people like their jobs. But they like getting paid to be not very valuable, rather than being paid to be actually useful.
Lockheed would be a perfect example in the US. People whose ethics are flexible enough to make them feel okay while working there tend to love the job? Why? Because they focus on hiring incompetent people and having them do nothing, because they earn their money by being bodies in seats. LM literally doesn't want highly productive people, because they are primarily paid to be part of the dole / welfare system and not to produce anything. From a professional perspective, it's unthinkably bad. Ethically, it's unconscionable. But as far as pay/work ratio, it's a gold mine. It doesn't pay like a serious engineering shop, but the work load pretty much doesn't exist. So much so, that they have whole departments of people with no training labeled as engineers and it is mostly little old ladies who don't even know what the project is that they are assigned to. LM just needs people with degrees sitting in seats keeping them warm and the US gov't pays them to sit there because it looks good to Congress to employ so many people who are, quite by definition, desperate (and morally flexible.)
