I applied on LinkedIn and was contacted by a recruiter within a couple days. After a pleasant and insightful initial screening, the recruiter said that she'd love to set me up for a follow-up interview with the hiring manager. She also asked me how much I was making annually and then said that LinkedIn doesn't disclose their salary ranges, but that my expected salary is definitely within the range of the role.
I didn't hear back and followed up with her a couple times. The team seemed to be really busy and eventually, 2-3 weeks later, I had my phone interview with the hiring manager. She sounded amazing and so did the role. The recruiter then told me the next day they'd like me to move forward to a first round of interviews with the team, which I was really excited about. Then I never heard back from them... so I followed up and found out that the recruiter had left her role. Looks like I fell through the crack, so I nagged the hiring manager to see how far they were in the process and eventually got back in the process. Long story short, it was an unnecessarily long interview process (almost 3 months) because of busy schedules, turnover (likely not very often) and just slow (or maybe complex) scheduling process. The first half of my interview experience was negative (because I had to follow up multiple times with the recruiter every step of the way and I felt like I had to really want the job). The second half of my interview experience was good (got assigned to a new recruiter, who was great and beyond helpful), but there were negative elements from the first half of the process that we didn't discover until much later. For example, the job level changed (along with the salary expectations) midway through the process (but I didn't find out that the salary range was now 20-30% less than what I expected until I received the offer).
I really liked all the people I met with, but the process perplexed me. For such a seemingly nimble company with smart people, they don't seem to have the critical processes figured out (as with documenting recruiting notes and ensuring these were passed along). Maybe it was an isolated incident and I'm sure there were other factors at play, but it seemed like they were taking their sweet time filing the role despite the team being stretched really thin. I appreciate the genuine interest they have in making sure that they're hiring the right candidate for the role and that each candidate has enough runway to succeed. I also appreciate that management takes into consideration how the candidate compares to other people on the team, instead of just looking at the candidate's years of experience, regardless of whether they're relevant to the role. It does seem like they hire for specific types of people (there are lots of people from eBay, Google and prestigious consulting firms) and from conversations with the leadership team, they seem to value these specific experiences (which is fine, except that it doesn't create a very diverse team). The people I met were very nice and passionate about solving the problems that LinkedIn users face, but they didn't mention much about the overall vision of the company (is LinkedIn just getting started? What's next?).
I received an offer that was 20% less than my expected salary. They were really kind and thoughtful in having the leadership team actually explain to me why they arrived at this compensation package, but it was still a not-so-great surprise after going through the long interview process thinking that it was going to align with my current salary (per conversation with the first recruiter). I was actually about ready to accept the offer if they had budged just slightly on the salary, bonus or RSU, but no such luck... again, I thought this was strange, considering that they had spent 3 months interviewing me, flying me to the Bay Area, and roughly 2 weeks putting together an offer and having the leadership team talk to me throughout the process.
