The recruitment process started with a two-hour coding test in the relevant language followed by a one-hour online interview where my answers were discussed. Nearly two full months later, a final three-hour in person interview was scheduled, consisting of a twenty-minute presentation about my career so far, a forty-minute behavioral interview, an hour-long white boarding session, and a final forty-five minutes to ask questions of other employees.
The behavioral sessions were remarkably negative in focus and felt more like a interrogation than an interview. I was asked five separate questions centered on self-critique, such as what people find annoying about me and what my worst qualities are. While one or two such questions are expected, two-thirds of the interview was conducted in this way. I found the dynamics with the interviewers unwelcoming; when I shared a professional failure (in response to a question), it was brushed off for not being embarrassing enough. The technical portion was handled by a separate pair of interviewers who were much more welcoming during the whiteboarding of circular buffers and matrix multiplication algorithms. The final employee Q and A was friendly, though it lacked the formal atmosphere I would have preferred for an interview setting.
Following the conclusion of this extensive process, the communication was incredibly disappointing. Despite the six hours of total interview time and significant prep work I invested, I was ghosted for a month. I sent weekly follow-up emails to the hiring manager and received no response at all. It was only after I reached out to the generic careers email address that I finally received any word. This lack of basic professional courtesy after such a long process is unacceptable and unprofessional. The interview overall is clearly designed as a stress test focused significantly on negatives and technical traps, which I do not believe reveals a candidate's true potential.