Job seekers come in two major archetypes:
Casual: Willing to accept an above-average job search length in exchange for a high-quality role.
Hurried: Willing to accept a non-premium role in exchange for rapid placement.
This article targets the causal interviewer, who will want to optimize on performance per round, rather than the hurried strategy of taking many interviews, which could lead to a faster offer but it will also reduce performance per company and tend to gate the candidate from accessing premium roles.
Being too casual is also a pitfall. Ideal performance requires deliberate and regular practice in order to achieve a sharpening or positive snowballing effect on performance. Besides, the intent of the casual seeker is to target a premium offer, which involves acquiring competing offers, and sparse interviews are unlikely to generate this situation.
So, what’s the ideal count of interviews per week? The answer is 3-5 interviews per week.
Interviews take place during the work week, so more than five interviews in a week means you will interview twice in one day, leading to performance lost and interview fatigue through various mechanisms:
Switching costs
Back-to-back scheduling
Focus split per company, causing an opportunity cost relative to company-specific preparation
Zero is unacceptable because it isn’t a job search. The occasional break week during a job search is totally fine, but those will be exceptional weeks on an as-needed basis, not our ordinary or default strategy.
Ditto for one interview per week. In fact, it may be preferable to schedule zero instead of one in a deload week, to prevent an offer trap where you have no ability to bargain using a competing offer.
Here’s another reason that one interview per week isn’t ideal: It raises the stakes of that particular interview. If you fail this interview then you have lost an entire week, which is a nontrivial mass of time, and even if you pass this interview then you are at a loss of bargaining power, which makes the target company intimidating even if that is not their intent. High-stakes interviews are associated with stress, anxiety, and performance loss.
What, then, about two interviews each week? The problem is that this is still a high-stakes situation. There are only two targets, and if you fail to impress either of them then you are in a position of weak bargaining power. We don’t expect to pass any particular interview, so expecting to pass both is even less likely. So we go into the weak expecting a loss which reaps what is sows.
The solution? 3-5 interviews per week. With 3 interviews:
You can fail any of them and still have passed most of them.
You can fail most of them and still get an offer.
You can obtain competing offers, and even multiple competing offers.
You can space Monday/Wednesday/Friday so there is plenty of rest between companies.
There is no head-to-head negotiation. Any particular company is competing against a group, not a single competitor.
3-5 is a range, so what should you actually target?
I don’t have a strong opinion, but I would lean toward booking five for two reasons:
If you try to book 3 interviews, logistics may pinch you into a smaller number
At the start of your job search, vis a vis the snowball method, we are basically interviewing for practice, so a little performance risk early on is fine and better than performance risk later in the process