Timing

Although it is tempting to apply to your top choice first or to apply to every job all at once, it’s important to pace yourself.

Learn more about the job market and your priorities by having exploratory conversations to test the waters.

Avoid interview burnout by understanding your personal bandwidth/recruiting pipeline

Exercise your interviewing muscles.

Pacing job applications

Ideally, you want the timing of offers that overlap as much as possible in order to make a fully informed decision. Here are a few strategies you can try:

The Rusty Interviewer 🕸️

You haven’t interviewed in while, but really want to land a job at your dream company.

Before applying to your top choice, start applying to companies you’re not as keen on ideally at the start.

Once you’ve exercise your interviewing muscles, then apply to the companies you’re more excited by.

The Thoughtful Interviewer 👀

You may not be actively exploring, but you are casually keeping an eye out on very exciting opportunities.

Applying to select companies one and a time will allow you to manage your calendar, avoid interview burnout, and most importantly dive deeper into an organization.

However, this strategy may mean you may not have all the external datapoints you need to make a decision.

The Optimizing Interviewer 🏎️

You are aiming to get as many interviews and offers as possible.

Apply to companies in clusters of 3-5 every 3 weeks.

This allows you interview with a cohort of companies and their competitors in a specific industry.

Not only will you get a better sense of the industry, but often if you inform your recruiter that you are interviewing with a competitor they will expedite your process.

**Note: For companies that tend to have long processes (e.g. Google), you might want to apply early.

Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.

Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (

CtrlP

) instead.