applied to Cohere for an MLE new grad position about 3 weeks ago. got a recruiter email after 10 days, did the screen last week, and now it's been 5 business days with no update.
is that normal? i don't know if i should follow up or if that just looks desperate. the recruiter said "we'll be in touch within a week" but we're at the edge of that window now.
also how should i be prepping in the meantime, is it mostly leetcode or do they go deeper on NLP stuff even for new grads? i'm a CS grad but i took like one NLP elective.
3 replies
tired_recruiter
5 days at or near the stated window? follow up. one email, polite, forward the original thread so they don't have to search. 'wanted to check in on timeline' is fine. ghosting after saying a week is unprofessional on their end anyway, you're not being pushy by asking.
careerveteran
on prep: even for new grad MLE they'll expect you to actually understand what an embedding is and why it matters. not 'train a neural net from scratch' level but you should be able to explain cosine similarity and why it's used in retrieval without reading off a flashcard. one elective is honestly enough foundation if you can articulate it clearly.
ml_mike
i'd also look at Cohere's blog/docs. they actually publish good content on how their models work. reading their API documentation is prep too, it shows you understand what they actually build.