One hour of interview about emotional intelligence plus one hour about technical writing. The first hour was very painful psychologically. Over and over again asking to know the details about how you failed in different ways. Perhaps 20 in all. Really no point in dredging up all of a person's past pain and trauma. I mean why put both parties through all that? A good interviewer can figure out a person's basic nature in 20 minutes or less. The "technical" part seems to indicate they mostly care not about real writing, but whether you can spout their favorite buzzwords. So phony. And get this? All of this effort for just a 3 month contract! How much emotional intelligence do you need to worry about for such a short stint? And then they don't hire. Meanwhile 3 months have passed and their posting for the job is still active and unknowing recruiters are still contacting me about it! They could have had the job done by now, but no, they will go on seeking whatever they deem as perfection and meanwhile their customers suffer as nothing is getting done. And, oh, by the way, they didn't even have the courtesy to get back to me to let me know I didn't get the job. After I spent all that grueling in-person interview experience. My advice to everyone: just stay away. It's not worth it to work with such people.

I'm sharing my experience of interviewing at Confluence Sydney. I applied through their website for the position of a Senior Technical Writer, this happened after the team member advised me to do so while we were connected on a professional community. The only pro I experienced was that the HR shortlisted my application and sent out an email to me quite swiftly. However, I also credit my own experience and skillset in the applied position for this (7 years into core tech). This is the section that I will be filling up the most. After the initial email from the HR, I was asked to speak to her remotely. The HR was very unprofessional and made me wait for about 20 mins before she joined the call. Post the call, I was given a writing task which I submitted after 2 days. I waited for some form of acknowledgement from the HR and on not getting any I wrote to her after 3 days of submission only to learn that the HR apparently did not receive the attachment of the assignment. This was bizarre considering the kind of silence from her end when she received my email but not the attachment. Even if that was true, she expected me to magically imagine the scenario and check with her from my end- which I actually did because I was looking for just the acknowledgement that she had received it. The strange part comes now. The very day I sent her the attachment again (within a matter of few hours considering the time zone difference and the actual working hours), and she assured me that she received it, I got an email saying they would not be proceeding with my application. While there can be multiple facets to this, what I only expected was some honesty from the HR because the way she interacted seemed shady as well as suspicious. I’m not convinced she even got my work reviewed because in all her interactions, she was sloppy and took no responsibility. Even if they weren't convinced about my candidature, it would have not left me with a bad taste if the HR had been a little professional and not been so outrightly dishonest and lying.