How to balance multiple companies for interviews?
I'm an MLE/Data Scientist.
I'm fortunate enough to have multiple companies interviewing at the same time BUT this is getting tough to manage and prepare.
They're all shades (early, mid, late stage startups, recent IPO) and not FAANG so I can't schedule them months out.
The companies also have like 3-5 rounds over multiple days so it's kinda chaotic to manage and prepare for so many things (DSA, SQL, data engineering, data science, system design).
Right now I have 3-5 interviews per week (3 companies) almost.
Discussion
(2 comments)- 0
5 months agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroFirst, I recommend following the advice in my job searching course here: https://www.jointaro.com/course/ace-your-tech-interview-and-get-a-job-as-a-software-engineer/order-matters/
I know that it's hard to have wiggle room in this market, but you should still have some (1-2 weeks). 1 week is still a good amount of time where you can learn/prepare a lot, so there's still impact in moving your "higher-tier" companies 1-2 weeks out and grouping them together.
On top of your personal preference, there's 2 other angles:
- Similarities of interviews - If a bunch of interviews will ask you the same tech stack and question types, it's best to group them so you can study for them all at once.
- Interview process quality - In other words, prioritize the companies with more reasonable loops (the ideal is just a single technical phone screen and then an onsite). If a company has like a recruiter screen followed by a take-home followed by an automated coding screen followed by 2 phone screens followed by 2 onsites, that's the kind of place you want to avoid when you have multiple interviews as you have far better fish to fry.
- 05 months agoEng @ Taro
When I was interviewing, I would schedule my lower priority companies first and schedule my higher priority companies later. Here are the benefits of scheduling the lower priority companies first:
- You can get the interviewing anxiety out of the way.
- You can find out whether you have any gaps in knowledge.
- If you get an offer, you won't feel guilty about letting it expire since it's not from a company at the top of your list.
If you are feeling the interviews are too hectic where it's affecting your performance, it's okay to space them out more.
Make sure to have an interview retrospective at the end of each interview to go over what went well and what could have gone better. Use that knowledge to decide what skill you need to invest more time into.
