If you've ever applied to multiple jobs at once, then you know the challenges of dealing with each company's different hiring timelines. You might be reaching the final stages of interviews with one business while another that you're excited about drags its feet.
At a certain point you might wonder, 'Should I tell the hiring manager or recruiter that I'm interviewing with other companies?'Schwager, the CEO and co-founder of GrowthAssistant, has interviewed thousands of people during her 20-year career working in recruiting — and she's made hundreds of hires as a result. As a leader who values transparency, Schwager tells CNBC Make It she was surprised when a recent job candidate said in a late-stage interview that they needed more time before accepting an offer — because they were in conversations with another company. As Schwager sees it, 'there's a kind of an old-school way of interviewing where everybody keeps their cards close to their chest with the offer process where you are in your other interviews. But it's not really setting up the relationship to start on a basis of transparency and being candid with one another.' While she acknowledges that not everybody or every company values that level of candidness, 'if that's important to you, either as an interviewer or as a candidate, this is a great place to test it, in the interview process.'Schwager isn't saying that you should start every job interview with a rundown of all the businesses you're talking to. But, mentioning it to a recruiter in your first conversation could help clear things up down the line. As a hiring manager, Schwager says hearing about a candidate's interview experience with another company could clue her into whether her business can offer them what they're looking for.For example, if the candidate is excited about another job that will manage a team of 50, while Schwager's role will have a more limited scope of managing five, she'd rather know that sooner than late