Ask HN: How much Slack do you give a recruiter? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How much Slack do you give a recruiter?

I’m (almost) at the offer stage with a company that I really like. The engineers that I’ve spoken with are great, the work sounds interesting, and the industry is exciting. My experience with the recruiter (from the company) has been wanting. They had email problems, it takes a long time to get responses, and they told me an offer was coming more than a week ago. I had to reach out to find out what was going on with the offer (it’s still coming)

I feel like once I get in the engineering group, things will be fine, but the delays with the recruiter are making me have second thoughts about what otherwise was a very exciting prospect.

Is slow communication indicative of bad communication throughout the company, or just a fluke? Should I be worried?

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Don't plan around or rely on this prospective offer. Continue to apply for other jobs. You may end up with better offers.

If it comes through as expected, great, you can evaluate your options at that point. Until then, you should hope for the best, but plan for the worst, these things can and do get cut off at any time, nothing is final until your first day.

This is indicative of bureaucracy, not bad communication. This advice applies to any kind of business transaction / negotiation like buying a house, car, whatever, talk is good, but it doesn't mean anything and can't be relied upon until its in writing and money changes hands.

No, if you like the job and the prospective team, don’t worry about it. There’s no telling what the internal bureaucracy is at the company. Even VERY large, well-known, desirable companies can be slow and disorganized in the interview process. No telling how many sign offs, background checks, etc. are required before extending the offer.

Even if the internal recruiter is completely incompetent, the odds of you ever having a future interaction with them are near zero.

It is greatly to your benefit to remain calm, cool, patient, and polite. You never know if the recruiter has to go to bat for you internally. If they don’t like you, they won’t do it.

Good luck!

Sounds pretty normal. Most of these recruiters are not senior and have not learned how to communicate with prospective hires. The lack of professionalism can be a bit jarring, especially if you are applying for a senior-level position.

Edit: I wouldn’t worry. Engineering depts are usually well insulated from whatever nonsense is happening in the HR dept

If you can, route at least one (polite) message around the recruiter. At the least, it can create pressure on the recruiter to promptly answer email in the future.

For me it would depend on how big the company is. If it is sufficiently big i.e FANG, I wouldn't worry about it much. For a smaller company I might.

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