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Due to job fairs and whatnot I have a lot of interviews lined up before on campus interviewing starts. I am concerned about possibly having too many callbacks and not enough time to do them. I may be terrible at interviewing and perhaps I won't have this issue but in case I do find myself with a lot of callbacks is it bad to decline them after a screening interview? My top choices would not be screening me until weeks after the fairs and I am concerned about not having time to go on any potential callbacks from these firms until late in the process, possibly when most of the class has been filled.

Anonymous User wrote:Due to job fairs and whatnot I have a lot of interviews lined up before on campus interviewing starts. I am concerned about possibly having too many callbacks and not enough time to do them. I may be terrible at interviewing and perhaps I won't have this issue but in case I do find myself with a lot of callbacks is it bad to decline them after a screening interview? My top choices would not be screening me until weeks after the fairs and I am concerned about not having time to go on any potential callbacks from these firms until late in the process, possibly when most of the class has been filled.

Why not see if you can just schedule the callbacks for later, so that you can do all of your callbacks around the same time? Also, you can keep offers open for 45 days, so you do have some wiggle room in terms of holding onto an early firm offer while your top choices decide (although not as much as you used to). This doesn't really seem like a problem to me if you just plan ahead. Most firms won't substantially fill their classes too early if they are doing OCI.

GeePee wrote: Why not see if you can just schedule the callbacks for later, so that you can do all of your callbacks around the same time? Also, you can keep offers open for 45 days, so you do have some wiggle room in terms of holding onto an early firm offer while your top choices decide (although not as much as you used to). This doesn't really seem like a problem to me if you just plan ahead. Most firms won't substantially fill their classes too early if they are doing OCI.

I am pretty sure this is only 28 days these days with NALP firms (though my school says 30)

http://www.nalp.org/fulltextofnalpprinc ... dstandards

nymario wrote:

GeePee wrote: Why not see if you can just schedule the callbacks for later, so that you can do all of your callbacks around the same time? Also, you can keep offers open for 45 days, so you do have some wiggle room in terms of holding onto an early firm offer while your top choices decide (although not as much as you used to). This doesn't really seem like a problem to me if you just plan ahead. Most firms won't substantially fill their classes too early if they are doing OCI.

I am pretty sure this is only 28 days these days with NALP firms (though my school says 30)

http://www.nalp.org/fulltextofnalpprinc ... dstandards

Oops, my mistake. I originally meant to say that it declined from 45 to 28 days but somehow still wrote that the old version of the NALP guidelines is the current one.

It is perfectly acceptable and encouraged to cancel a scheduled callback once you have an offer and know you won't want to work at the firm.

It's basically ridiculous to imagine declining a callback before you have an offer, but once you do the whole game changes and it's much preferred you cancel / decline any excess interviews you're sure you don't want or need.

Hypothetical example: On August 25th firm X offers you a callback and you schedule it for September 14th. But on September 5th you get an offer from firm Y after a callback. On balance, you're sure you prefer firm Y. Calling firm X to cancel the callback is 100% appropriate and encouraged as quickly as possible to minimize costs to firm X.

Until you have that first offer, don't decline anything. Feel free to schedule firms you're less interested in later to leave room for firms you're more interested up front, but try to keep everything within a fairly narrow time window because the later you get into a firm's schedule the fewer spots they may have available.