The recruiter found them on LinkedIn. They weren’t even seriously looking, but they decided to give it a shot. Four months later, this was the process.
A thirty-minute recruiter call. A written technical assessment — around twenty questions and scenarios, answered and emailed back, about two hours of work. An hour with the hiring manager, an hour with two team members, three more hours of a quantitative test and a behavioural interview, an hour with the hiring manager’s boss. And then an onsite in Dallas: the company flew them out, covered the hotel, the rental car, the food, and put them in a room with five different people from nine in the morning until three, with a one-hour lunch break.
After all of that, they were rejected. The reason, relayed second-hand, was that the team had “technical concerns” about their experience — though when asked, the recruiter could not name a single specific one. They were also, apparently, not enthusiastic enough about the company, and couldn’t give a good reason for wanting to leave their current job.
They had given a good reason, at the start, and never hid it. Their wife was about to begin a master’s, most of their family lived in Texas, and they wanted to move closer while she studied. They were not even upset about losing the role. They were upset about the four months it took to learn that nobody could say why.