Having an in is always nice, for those of us on the outside the interview process is tedious and does take a while. Various different phone interviews, talking to recruiters, emailing back and forth. It is all rather time consuming.
Oh, I actually did have several email and phone conversations with two different recruiters. The only thing that my Google contact saved me was having to do one phone screen. That's it.
And yeah, applying for a job just about anywhere is rather tedious. But all the recruiter job-type/schedule coordination probably took less than two hours spread over two weeks. It didn't seem all that burdensome. Ce la vie.
