My experience was not standard: I was contacted by a mentor who had heard I was available for a new position and able to relocate to a new city; he referred me to the hiring manager and arranged a phone interview. When I contacted the hiring manager, he was ready to hire me; he really seemed to just need to confirm there weren't any quality reasons to reject me. After the phone interview, I applied for the position on the company web site, and attached my resume and cover letter through their web interface. After the hiring manager completed a number of other interviews, he contacted me to discuss availability dates. Once we agreed on a start date, he submitted my info to the HR department and they sent me an offer. The offer was straight forward and no real reason to negotiate. Even if I had wanted to counter-offer for salary or benefits, I didn't see an easy way to do that, since the offer was sent from the HR department and not directly connected to the hiring manager. Because I knew that the business unit had reached its contract dollar limit, I figured that countering for salary would cost me the offer. So I accepted and traveled across country as fast as I could to start on time.