Should I respond to tech recruiters when I'm not ready to interview yet?

Question

My company recently laid off 15% of its workforce. I'm currently in the process of updating my resume, and plan on prepping for interviews again (doing LC) once I come back from vacation.

After my LI announcement of the recent layoffs, recruiters had started to reach out to me. I feel flattered by the response but I don't feel that I'm ready to take on interviews yet before I do some proper preparation.

Should I ignore calendly invites and wait before aggressively reaching out (to network/connect) with recruiters when I'm in a more ready position to apply?

Is there any value in starting these conversations at all at atm? Or would it be a waste of my time -- and I should instead focus my time and attention towards prepping for interviews instead?

Currently, I'm not really looking to rush the process and I feel like recruiters can be pretty pushy sometimes in wanting to fill in roles for companies.

Any thoughts?

Rahul Pandey · Accepted Answer

Do you have reason to believe that the roles would fill up? Or do you feel like you're applying for specialized, very senior roles?

If so, you may want to at least hop on the call with the recruiter to keep the lead warm, and then stretch out when you start the formal interview process.
If not, you should not feel pressured to talk to recruiters. The same role will exist in 3 months or 6 months as well, and you saying "not now" may actually improve your desirability as a candidate.

In general, recruiters will try to sell you on how magical and rare an opportunity is, but it's almost always BS. You should make your own judgement. If the company reaching out is a small startup (< 10 engineers), there may truly be some urgency. But for most other roles, especially those at companies like Meta, Google, Microsoft, etc, they will continue hiring for software engineers year round.

Should I respond to tech recruiters when I'm not ready to interview yet?

Discussion