Rob Hope

I wanted to summarize some tactical thoughts I had as I searched for a new role at the end of 2025 and beginning of 2026. I won’t name names or companies here, because the idea is not to shame any particular entity. That said, if people can learn from my experience, that would be a positive. I’ll address my emotional thoughts as well as the interview experiences themselves in other posts.

I should start by saying I’ve hired many engineers throughout much of my career. I’ve lost count, but it’s more than a hundred. I’ve also hired engineers at Amazon, and participated in over a hundred Amazonian interview loops, for my team and on behalf of other teams, at every level from junior developer and intern to senior engineer, product manager, technical project manager, and engineering manager.

Valuing the Candidate Experience

With the exception of a few companies, the candidate experience bar no longer exists. This shouldn’t come as a complete surprise to anyone, but having been on both sides, I found the experience to be mostly unpleasant. I expected it from the discussions on social media, so I made sure as much as possible to dismiss the lack of response as part of the process. Becoming discouraged would have not helped in any way.

As a result, I didn’t spend a lot of time reflecting on the experience if the company did not reach out to me. If they only sent a conciliatory email saying my resume had been reviewed and I was not chosen, I also did not reflect much on those events once I felt I got my resume formats under control.

Two things really caught my attention from a candidate experience standpoint.

When I was a hiring manager, when I found the right candidate, it was time to move and get that person in their seat. Notice I did not say the perfect candidate. The first right candidate. The number of reposted jobs in the market indicate that companies have become very risk averse, or have decided to look for the perfect candidate, and that’s translated into a lack of urgency that is honestly disturbing. As a hiring manager, I have a team that needs to get stuff done. I’ve seen companies waiting months for the perfect person rather than getting value out of an excellent person. In one case, I had passed all the interviews, and the company was still hesitating. I sent a polite email to my recruiting contact basically saying that I was ready to accept an offer, the role seemed like a good fit, interviews had passed, so if they were to extend the offer I’d accept. They sent me a note the next day removing me from consideration. Companies are letting perfection get in the way of progress, and the lack of urgency is showing. As a result, after the first three weeks I stopped applying to any positions I found that had been reposted.

I withdrew myself from candidacy several times during my search. In all cases but one, there was a clear misalignment in some capacity, and I felt I would not be good for the role. That’s expected and it’s necessary to have an objective viewpoint on your own appropriateness for a position.

However, one company’s screening call was so horrible that I withdrew on the spot. While I can’t guarantee it, it seems as though the person doing the call was a contractor. They were short-tempered, monotone, appeared to be reading from a script, and automatically shut down any question or nuance in any answer given. For example, when I was asked for a start date, and I reasonably mentioned that would be contingent on offer timeline, they interrupted me mid-sentence and again demanded a start date. Similarly when I was asked about compensation, my question about compensation components and equity structure was also immediately shut down. The interviewer closed the conversation by saying they’d pass my information on to the hiring manager. I went into their jobs portal and withdrew.

There Are Quality Recruiters and Companies Doing The Best They Can

With the exception of that one screener I mentioned, the recruiters I did speak to were excellent, and they represented their companies well. Several went above and beyond to ensure transparency of communication and alignment of expectations. One went so far as to call me to ensure that the holidays would not impact their ability to extend an offer if a hiring decision was made as the holiday period impacted people’s availability.

In one instance, a no hire decision was delivered via conference call, in person, promptly. While I was not selected, I was impressed with the company’s commitment to their candidates.

The other no hire decisions were delivered with less personal notes or tone, but I remind myself that there are now legal ramifications to how information is delivered. I was not ghosted after getting into hiring pipelines, but a couple of the no hire decisions were odd and abrupt, at a time I was expecting to discuss an offer. A few other companies might have ghosted me after final interviews, but I was diligent in following up and asking for next steps. The lack of feedback in these situations is frustrating to be sure, but having been a hiring manager I understand it.

The one use case where the lack of feedback has a direct impact is with companies that follow a model where you can only reapply to other positions after six months, or possibly even a year, has elapsed. In theory this allows the candidate time to address any perceived gaps. In cases where there were missing data points, or spots where a particular bar was not quite met, offering a chance to reapply after growth has occurred doesn’t really help if feedback is not provided, because gaps can’t be perceived with any accuracy. Many companies do this as part of their process.

Companies Don’t Know What They Want

I’ve been an engineering manager for more than 12 years. With that, I can generally get a sense of how teams are running based on the information I can ascertain during an interview. Two things stood out to me as I cycled through the process.

In some cases, companies don’t understand what a healthy engineering culture looks like. This surfaces in topics like their approach to operational excellence, their perspective on support or on-call rotations, and their approach to collaboration. In one instance, I went through seven interviews for a company. The recruiter, and an “advisor” that I had a chance to speak with, both stressed leading with empathy as a key component of their culture. It appeared that their interviewers did not share their sentiment, as none of them asked me to introduce myself, and one of them actively interrupted me almost at every step of every answer to keep the process moving.

Some companies that are growing fast and trying to scale either personnel-wise or technically don’t really know what they are looking for from a skills or experience perspective. This leads to some difficulties in things like a proper job description, or a proper evaluation of skills. One company advertised for an engineering manager but really wanted a senior engineer that could lead projects. Another was reimagining the engineering manager as more of a hyper-technical TPM or operations role. Others weren’t sure how stable the team size would or should be. When that’s combined with either leadership that doesn’t really understand how engineering works, or with an unhealthy culture, getting to a hire decision becomes very difficult.

In these cases, I tried to ask open ended questions when my time to ask was provided, but also looked closely at the questions I was being asked. I paid particular attention to the types of challenges the interviewer was referencing. In situations like this I seek to remove as much ambiguity as possible about the role and the environment, while still presenting myself in the best way possible.

Managing Applications, Resumes, And Cover Letters

I’ve previously posted about my adjustments to my resume and my change in cover letter approach. I won’t go over those again here, other than to reiterate that I eventually decided on formats and approaches that were right for me, along with my background and experience. I think one should be happy with how they represent themselves to prospective employers should a human actually read what one produces.

I used Teal’s free job tracker to manage my applications, and it worked mostly well. The one gap that I found, but did not explore too much, was I could not see a clean way to track applications through statuses, meaning I could not filter by applications that were once in Interviewing but were not any longer. Other than that, it was reasonable, and the integration between their browser extension and job application sites was mostly well done.

I put up the famed green #OpenToWork banner on LinkedIn almost immediately. I’m not sure it made any difference in the early stages, and there was debate about its effectiveness as well as possible negative outcomes by using it, such as companies not wishing to hire people who were unemployed, or giving up leverage during the offer stage. After some consideration, I took the banner down publicly, choosing to leave it up only for recruiters. I have no way of gauging its impact on my job search, but I felt vaguely better not having it on my profile.

LinkedIn’s notifications systems have degraded considerably. There are noticeable delays, sometimes hours, between when an action occurred and the notification arrived. I am repeatedly reminded to accept a connection request that I had accepted hours before. Even the job search alerts seem less relevant time wise. I’m going to assume it’s a scale thing given the traffic likely on LinkedIn at the moment.

Referrals Ultimately Made The Difference

My ultimate success story would not have happened without a timely and unexpected referral. I think they remain the best way to get in the door. That said, I do think my resume adjustments had an impact on response times, and were helpful in landing the other interviews I participated in.

Results

Overall, I applied to 241 positions over close to four months.