can I ask a company to speed up their hiring process?

This post, can I ask a company to speed up their hiring process? , was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

I am interviewing with several companies, two of which I really like. Company A, I interviewed twice already, and they’ve been very responsive to my emails and thank-you notes. They also reached out to me without me emailing them first and told me there’s been a delay in hiring but they will update me soon. They have reposted the job again but continue to keep in contact with me, so I am unsure what is going on.

Company B, I interviewed for recently and it went well, and both the internal recruiter and the hiring manager replied to my thank-you notes. However, Company B’s timeline is four to six weeks, with a second interview in two weeks. I cannot wait this long and I will continue to apply for other jobs because I will be unemployed soon due to my contract at my current job ending. Both companies know my contract is ending very soon.

Is there a way to ask both companies to somehow speed up the process and make a decision without me ruining my chances?

Not really.

If you had an offer from Company A or B, at that point you could reach out to the other company and say something like, “I want to let you know that I have another offer that I need to respond to by Friday. I’m really interested in working with you though, so I wanted to check and see if you might be able to have a decision by then.” If they’re really interested in you, they might be willing to expedite things. That’s not guaranteed; even if they’re interested in hiring you, they might not be interested enough to short-circuit their process with other candidates, or they might have internal hiring processes they’re bound by. But it’s a reasonable thing to ask, and it’s definitely a thing that happens.

But without another offer that’s about to take you off the market, you can’t really ask them to speed up their process. That’s basically just saying, “I need a job soon, can you hurry up?” and that’s not really a thing that’s ever done or that would be compelling to them.

When a company is willing to expedite its process, it’s because the candidate is about to become unavailable to them if they don’t (because they’re on the verge of accepting another offer). They’re acting in their own interests to hire their top choice; they’re making the calculation that it’s worth it to them to forego other interviews, or bother the decision-maker on vacation, or juggle whatever they need to juggle to make a faster decision. You’d be asking them to speed things up because it would be in your interests, and it just doesn’t work that way.

You might read this and think, “Well, if I can use another offer to get them to move faster, couldn’t I just say I have another offer even if I don’t?” But it’s a bad idea. Aside from the issue with lying itself, you risk hearing, “We can’t meet that deadline so you should take the other job and best of luck with it” and then being removed from the running. (In theory you could come back later and say you decided not to take the other job so would like to remain a candidate, but then you look like you were probably bluffing and that’s a big strike against you.)

Unfortunately, employers move at the speed they move at. It might be because they’re slow and indecisive, but there can also be good reason for it, like questions about the role that need to be ironed out before they hire, or a pending potential reorg of the team, or a last-minute internal candidate, or all sorts of things. The best thing you can do is exactly what you’d do if these jobs rejected you or didn’t exist at all: keep applying to other places. If they come back to you with an offer, great. If they don’t, you won’t have slowed down on their account.