I interviewed for a TA/recruitment role and was asked to complete a sourcing exercise involving identifying candidates for a live, hard to fill vacancy. I invested several hours into the task and produced a shortlist of strong candidates aligned to the brief. Following the process, I received a generic rejection email with no specific feedback relating to the task, sourcing quality, or assessment criteria. I subsequently requested feedback given the time and effort involved, but did not receive a response. My advice to future candidates would be to clarify expectations around interview tasks upfront, particularly where exercises involve live business requirements or operational work as you are essentially working for them for free on a hard to fill role. Candidate experience matters, especially in talent acquisition hiring processes.

I went through the full process: recruiter screening, a working session with another recruiter, and a conversation with the co-founder. Overall, it was disappointing. From the beginning, talent acquisition was framed as a highly operational function, and success was measured by metrics that don’t seem meaningfully tied to business impact. The communication throughout the process was also poor, I didn’t receive any follow-up after my conversation with the co-founder. The final round was particularly uncomfortable. The co-founder appeared visibly annoyed during the interview, asked several questions that felt disconnected or unclear, and created an environment that felt tense rather than conversational. His pitch for the company centered heavily on working late in the office as the path to developing top talent, which raised concerns for me about the culture. By the end, it felt like the “culture fit” interview was less about alignment and more about testing how much someone is willing to tolerate.