Comment by andyjohnson0
2 days ago
A few years ago I was "between roles" and applied for a developer position at Roku. For a short time they seemed moderately interested, and I exchanged a few emails with a senior in-house recruiter. And then they went completely quiet - no response to my follow-up emails. So I just put it behine me and got on with looking for a job.
Just over a year later I received an email from another in-house recruiter at Roku, thanking me for my application but regretting that they wouldn't be going forward with it (or some such corporate-speak). Which was kind of surprising.
I did a few searches and discovered that the date they went quiet roughly coincided with a sizeable round of redundancies. I also looked up the new recruiter and found that they were new to the company and quite junior. So, presumably, their first task had been to clear-up the backlog. That year was by far the longest I've ever waited for a response to a job application.
I have a leaderboard of some of the longest turn-around times from initial contact to rejection. Thus far the winners (if you can call them that) have been:
Docusign (4 YEARS); Nintendo (34 months); Google (30 months); Starbucks (22 months); Netflix (18 months); Astral (13 months); Snowflake (8 months)
But I also have a short list of shortest turn-around times. I say this because some of them are truly insane:
GitHub (3 hours); Valve (4 hours, but it was a real human with actual comments); Lockheed martin (2 hours); UserTesting (1 hour); Mozilla (30 minutes); Cloudflare (-2 minutes); Matterport (0 minutes)
The -2 minutes you see there is one of the most insane things I've ever experienced: As I'm filling in the application, I get an email simultaneously thanking me for going throug the recruitment process but saying they "reviewed my application" (that hadn't even been fully submitted yet) and that I wasn't a good fit for the role.
Matterport wins the award for "well at least they're not bullshitting" -- as soon as I had submitted the application, I didn't even get an email saying thank you, just a straight up dialog box saying "You won't be considered for this position."
My worst experience was with Microsoft. Somewhere, their system is designed such that if you ever fall out of the standard process, you're "rejected" -- I have more rejection emails for a position I ended up getting (which got canned within the year, ironically enough) than any other kind of email, including daily emails with the recruiter and hiring manager. I got an email telling me "sorry no thanks" *after* I had already signed the paperwork.
Those are some long turnaround times!
I actually had a positive, although a bit weird, experience with Microsoft. First, I got a response 3 months after I applied to schedule an interview! I figured it was due to the holidays. After the interview the recruiter called me personally and gave me the bad news that I didn’t get the job, but actually gave me specific feedback on where I did well and poorly on the interview. I was shocked! I think it’s the only time I’ve ever received non generic feedback.
I’ve heard a lot of bad experiences too, so unfortunately I think I was an exception!
I had the same experience with Cloudflare, It's been awhile, but I recall I uploaded my resume as one of the first steps and while I was filling out the later steps (copying the resume contents into fields) I got the same rejection error on trying to move to the next step. I presumed it was looking for specific resume keywords.
And they didn't address the delay at all in their response to you?
Nope
> redundancies
Surely you meant lay-offs, or firings, not this corporate-speak.