I had a couple of interviews today. I won’t say who with because it doesn’t feel right to name them unless I’ve either accepted an offer or decided I’ll never seek or entertain an offer. Today were calls 4 and 5 out of 7 (so far).
It started with an acquaintance from a professional forum asking if I’d be interested in chatting about an opportunity at his company. I’d actually just started talking to the company about another role last year, before Lumigo made an offer that took me off the table. BTW, despite getting laid off, I’d still recommend Lumigo’s serverless monitoring and observability tools.
Back to the acquaintance. We chatted and he gave me a referral link to apply. That was followed by a call with the VP the role would report to, followed by a call with their HR guy who set up 4 interview calls. Of the two calls today, one was with the guy who referred me. The last call will be with the VP again.
If you’re not familiar with tech, this has been a pretty regular feature of interviews for me. Quite often there’s a meeting with the manager who owns the headcount, either arranged by HR or the person who referred you. If they feel you have good potential, then you get scheduled for the “full round,” during which you may meet with one or more of those people again.
Tomorrow will be call 6 of 7, followed by a screener call with HR from another company.
“Wait,” you ask. “Isn’t it bad for you to publicly state you’re meeting with another company?” Nope. A good company will be honest that you’re not the only person interviewing for the role and you should be honest about the fact that you’re interviewing elsewhere.
In my job hunt this time last year, I was juggling 5 companies and trying to keep them on track. I basically specified a week when I was expecting a couple to potentially make offers and tried to get them all to a decision by that week. And I did make one wait until the end of the week for that crazy ride at Amazon to play out.
Within 10 months, four of those five would announce layoffs and freeze hiring and I haven’t followed the last very closely.
In the game of job hunting and interviewing, you have to play some cards close to your chest, but being open about the fact that you’re job hunting and have irons in the fire is not one of them. Playing coy like that is like being back in school and trying to date three people without them knowing about each other. Maybe it doesn’t backfire, but why play that kind of game unless you want to be the kind of person who plays it?
Hopefully good news by next week. Knock wood. Fingers crossed.