At interviewing.io, we’ve seen hundreds of thousands of engineers go through job searches, and the biggest mistakes we see people make are all variations on the same theme: not postponing their interview when they aren’t ready.
I’ve found myself repeating that it’s OK to postpone interviews so often that I finally broke down and decided to make it a blog post. It’s very simple advice, so the bulk of this post will be spent trying to convince you that it’s fine to postpone. And then of course I’ll tell you what to say.
Do any of these situations sound familiar?
- A recruiter from a FAANG (or other top-tier) company contacts you out of the blue and invites you to interview. You do the recruiter call, and it goes well. The recruiter reaches out to schedule your technical phone screen. You haven’t practiced enough, and you know it, but you are scared to tell the recruiter that you want to postpone the interview by a few months (months?!) because the position may no longer be there. So, you plow ahead, do the phone screen, fail it, and then you’re frozen out for a year.
- You were able to postpone your technical phone screen and take the time to study up on data structures & algorithms problems. You do well in the interview. But then your recruiter schedules your onsite the following week. Because you were so focused on DS&A prep, you haven’t had much time to study up on system design. You fumble the system design interview during the onsite, and you either get rejected or get down-leveled.
Both of these situations are extremely common, but they’re both preventable. You can just ask to postpone. There are a few edge cases where that’s not a good idea, but in most situations, it’s the right thing to do.
When postponing is OK, and when you shouldn’t take our advice
If you’re applying to a large company with a centralized process (in other words, a process where you interview first and get matched with a team later), postponing is almost always OK. These companies are perpetually hiring, and their open roles are evergreen.1
Even if you’re applying to a large company with a decentralized process (where you interview for a specific team), we recommend postponing unless you’re extremely excited about the team you’re talking to. In that scenario, it’s possible that if you postpone, the slot will be filled. But if it’s not a perfect fit and you’d be OK with another team, we recommend postponing — in the worst case, you’ll simply get slotted into a different team.
The only time when postponing isn’t a good idea is when you’re applying to a very small company that has just one open headcount. In that scenario, it is possible that postponing will cost you the opportunity because they’ll choose another candidate. However, you can ask how likely that is to happen, up front.
With that edge case out of the way, here’s a little-known fact about how timing works at large companies: Recruiters don’t really care when you interview. Though they’d prefer that you interview sooner rather than later so they can hit their numbers, at the end of the day, they’d rather be responsible for successful candidates than unsuccessful ones.
Every recruiter, in every job search, will tell you that time is of the essence because of all the other candidates in the pipeline. Most of the time, that is irrelevant and just something they say to create an artificial sense of urgency. There are always other candidates in the pipeline because the roles are evergreen. But they have nothing to do with your prospects.
Exactly what to say to postpone your interviews
You can use this text verbatim when postponing your interviews, and, with some small edits, you can even use it several times (e.g., before the phone screen and then again before the onsite).
I’m really excited about interviewing at [company name]. Unfortunately, if I’m honest, I haven’t had a chance to practice as much as I’d like. I know how hard and competitive these interviews are, and I want to put my best foot forward. I think I’ll realistically need a couple of months to prepare. How about we schedule my interview for [date]?
One important thing to remember is to be conservative about how long it will take. You’ve probably heard the adage about how, when you have to estimate the time an engineering task will take, you should think of a number and double it. Here, you may even want to triple it.
I’ve seen many candidates ask for 2 weeks because that feels like a reasonable thing to ask for, only to have it blow up in their face when they realize they need to ask for another extension (which is still worth doing but harder because the company may think you’re taking them for a ride). If you need two months, ask for two months.
Postponing can also be a good way to control the timing of your job search
This section is extra credit, but once you get comfortable with postponing your interviews when you’re not prepared, you can use the same skills to batch your interviews and ultimately control the timing of your job search.
What does it mean to control the timing of your job search? Ideally, you want all of your offers to come in at the same time, both because it maximizes optionality (one company that arbitrarily offers first doesn’t rush you into making a decision) and maximizes leverage (you can negotiate from a position of power).
If you want to dive deeper into this process, take a look at a book I recently co-wrote, Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview. It includes a full chapter about how to manage your job search, which covers everything from determining the order in which to approach companies to how to speed them up and slow them down once you’re in process. There’s a lot more detail than I can touch in this post, and much of it depends on your specific circumstances, but you can probably get 50% of the way there just by postponing your interviews in batches.
The big insight here is that, except for the edge cases we discussed above, a recruiting process can be paused at any point.
In other words, you can do a bunch of outreach to companies, then do a bunch of enthusiastic recruiter calls, and THEN pause all the processes until you’re prepared to do technical phone screens.
Then, you batch the phone screens.
Finally, if needed, you pause again to give yourself time to prepare for onsites. Onsite interviews require a different skill set than technical phone screens. The technical phone screen isn’t about depth or fit — it’s just a way to cut people who aren’t likely to pass the onsite.
The onsite, on the other hand, isn’t just meant to cut poor performers. It’s at once a deeper dive into your technical ability and a way to gauge fit. If you’ll be interviewing with your future team (typical at companies with a decentralized process), it’s also meant to assess your ability to work together, collaborate on hard things, complement the team's existing skillset, and so on. It usually has some coding (to verify that your technical phone screen wasn’t a fluke), but the focus is usually on system design and behavioral interviews2, which are also the interviews commonly used for leveling decisions.
So, onsite prep is much more about system design and getting your stories right for your behavioral interviews. Some people can pull off prepping for both coding and sys design/behavioral at the same time. For many, depending on their existing familiarity with the material, it’s a tall order. So, it’s wise to take the time you need and prepare.
Then, once you’re ready, you batch the onsites.
When your offers come in, you should ask for extensions as needed, speed companies up, and start negotiating (which we’ve written about in the past and which, of course, is covered at great depth in the book).
Footnotes:
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Yes, it’s true that in 2022, we saw several FAANGs and many other companies freeze hiring, and if you had postponed your interviews, you’d have been left out in the cold. Despite how devastating these freezes were to affected candidates (and to the tech economy as whole), they are extremely rare, and in our humble opinion, not worth optimizing for or worrying about. You are very unlikely to have to deal with an impending freeze. ↩
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Some companies will also have technical deep dives, project presentations, assessments of niche skills, and so on. ↩