I have been debating about posting this, but decided to in the hopes it will help Hypotenuse really consider the roles they’re hiring for and also to warn future candidates. A third party recruiter reached out to me about the role. The first round was a 30-minute interview with the internal recruiter to find out more about the company and job fit. Seemed good, but there was about a 2-week gap in between the first and second round. During that time I had spoken to other blockchain companies who weren’t doing well. The third-party recruiter emailed me back that they wanted to setup a second round interview. I told her I wanted to pursue some web2 opportunities since web3 wasn’t doing well. She told me that since Hypotenuse is a consulting company they do web2 work and web3 work and were actually getting more leads due to all the other companies firing people. I decided do the second round interview which went very well where they had me live code and build an ERC20 contract. The interviews were very nice and I moved onto the third and final interview with the CTO. I was told this was a systems design interview. I was a bit worried since I had mainly been focusing on Solidity and don’t have much systems design experience. The third-party interviewer told me not to worry and this interview was a formality. The other 3 people I interviewed with really liked me and wanted me to join. During the third round, I prefaced to the CTO that I didn’t have much systems design experience. He said that was fine. He wanted me to talk through designing a code fuzzer and code coverage function. I was able to work through the problem and he told me my solution worked and made sense. We got along and I felt relieved since it seemed like I would get an offer. The CTO told me they only had 4 months of runway and leads were slowing down. I thought this was a bit of a red flag since the internal recruiter had told the third-party recruiter the opposite. However, I decided that due to the great culture reviews I had read on Glassdoor and the work/life balance they promised I would proceed. I sent the CTO a thank you email and he replied they’d let me know about next steps soon… this is where things went south. The day after I interviewed with the CTO I got an email saying they decided to pursue some other candidates? I knew for a fact they had no other candidates in the pipeline since the third-party recruiter told me they were having a very hard time filling the role and really had no other options. I felt that I had completely wasted my time. I initially didn’t even want to join due to the uncertainty of web3. Then when I was convinced to join and assured that everyone on the team loved me, all of a sudden the CTO decides I’m not a good fit? I asked for feedback since I was very confused and didn’t get any from the third-party recruiter. To be clear, the third-party recruiter was great along with the everyone I interviewed with including the CTO. However, if you don’t actually want to fill the position (which it seems like they don’t) please close the role and don’t interview for it. Don’t waste people’s time and get their hopes up. Take some time and change the job requirements.