Job seeker says 'urgent' hiring turned into 10 days of silence: 'Why is this even a thing?'
A post on Reddit’s r/jobs talked about the original poster being contacted two weeks ago by a recruiter about a role described as urgent enough to require three rounds of interviews within 48 hours. They moved meetings, stayed up until 2 a.m. completing a technical task framed as necessary for the final decision, and were told they were the top candidate and that the team loved them.
Then ten days of silence. A follow-up yesterday produced a generic automated reply about “aligning on headcount requirements.”
“If the role was so urgent that I had to jump through every single hoop like a circus animal in two days, how is it suddenly not urgent anymore the second I finish the work?” they wrote. “They demand 100% of your energy during the process but can’t even give you a thirty-second update when they decide to stall. Why is this even a thing?”
One commenter who had experience on the client side offered a possible explanation in the thread. “It’s not uncommon that getting the search process ramped up and securing the funding or slot for the role do not always have the same timing. A good recruiter would suss this out with the client. Unfortunately, when there’s ambiguity, it’s the applicant that suffers.”
Another user shared their own version of the same story: “I just got an offer Friday for a role that two months ago the hiring manager told me they needed to fill ‘yesterday.’ They still don’t have all the details about total compensation. The whole thing has been a clusterf*** and I’m seriously considering taking a competing offer that’s lower, but the company at least seems to know what they’re doing.”
Several commenters pushed toward a darker interpretation. “At this point I am convinced half of these urgent hiring flags are just fake pressure tactics to see how much free labour and compliance they can squeeze out of applicants before they even get hired,” one Redditor wrote.
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For job seekers navigating this kind of situation, the practical takeaway from the thread is probably this: respond to urgency at a pace that respects your own time and commitments, not at a pace dictated by a company that has demonstrated no reciprocal obligation to keep you informed.
The 2 a.m. technical task is probably something to think twice about next time, since it may be a red flag on the company’s operations, and even how they value their own employees.
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