For lateraling, what is the best time of year in terms of people looking to hire laterals?
What is people’s experience with typical timeline for hearing back from firms?
What firms tend to send actual rejections to laterals? VS who just has silent dings?
What firms have people heard of having hiring freezes right now?
Lateral season is probably hottest at the beginning of the year after bonuses hit, but people lateral throughout the year for various reasons.
Can be anywhere from same day, to months, to never. There really are no rules. Depends on how strong of a candidate you are and how pressing the firm’s needs are.
I don’t know of specific firms, but it can be very office by office. In general, formal rejection letters are much more rare these days. If you do get one, it would likely only be after a formal callback. This is especially true given that most laterals come in through either a recruiter or back channels (they know someone) rather than a more formal process like entry-level hiring. A big difference is you aren’t competing against X candidates for Y number of slots- sometimes it’s just a question of wither there is a slot in the first place.
I don’t know of any that have blanket firm-wide hiring freezes. But managing partners and department heads are likely to informally freeze hiring if things are slow. They simply tell interested candidates they aren’t hiring at the moment. That can change even month to month.