Recruiters: why do you ask “are interviewing with any other companies” and how should I answer?
I currently work at Amazon but for whatever reason finally took a Google recruiters call last week and figured, since I was going brush up on my fundamentals for the interview anyway, I might as well respond to a few other recruiters too - namely Facebook, Adobe and Oracle.
So far I’ve only done a phone-screen with Google but when we were scheduling the on-site I was asked if I was interviewing anywhere else and I said no (technically I wasn’t yet) but as I expect to be asked this again by the others I wanted to know why they ask this and if will saying yes/no help or hurt me?
Also - any thoughts between those companies? Eg, if all the offers were more or less the same so it was narrowed down to a question of work-culture etc - which would you prefer/avoid?
comments
And anecdotelly–i had offers from Google and Uber (among others) and negotiated them both up without showing anything in writing. You're right that they'll stop at a certain point though.
It has little to no effect on what our offer will be because the big companies you referenced utilize compensation bands by levels to avoid essentially starting an auction for candidates. As recruiters, we simply like to be in the know so we can council our interviewing team appropriately. Perhaps one of our interviewers worked at one of those companies previously and can share their personal experiences. Things like that.
Overall, I always encourage you to be honest and open with your recruiter. Don’t get me wrong; I know there are lots of bad recruiters out there but the good ones are going to fight on your behalf to get you your preferred interview date, compensation offer, team, etc and honesty about your activity helps with that.
There have been many cases where candidates have started interviewing elsewhere after starting to interview at Google and then accepting an offer elsewhere before even clearing hiring committee. That's also the logic behind those exploring offers, to force you to choose before other offers become clear.