My interview process with Splunk was the strangest I've ever experienced, and that's coming from someone who has changed jobs 3 times in the past 6 years. In a nutshell, HR did an extremely poor job of communicating the process to me and dragged everything out for an obscene amount of time, ultimately resulting in no offer. Let me explain... I applied through a friend and got a standard HR screen about two weeks later. Then they brought me into the office a week after that for interviews with the hiring manager and the other person on the team... so good so far. Those interviews went extremely well and I could tell they liked me a lot, so I left expecting good news but had no knowledge of whether I should be expecting a decision or more interviews. Turns out I had 4 more hours of interviews with people on crossfunctional teams that I would work with. I can't blame them for being thorough but this is where it started to get weird. The first person I talked to didn't even know what role I was interviewing for and had never seen my resume, but it went well. The next person asked some Google-style questions about manhole covers, songs that describe me, etc. That went well and he even told me he'd recommend me for hire. Next was a guy who flat out had an agenda to test my composure. I've been there before but he went over the top to the point of being degrading. He belittled my past experience saying things like "so you're saying you bridged the gap between engineering and sales... sounds like you weren't really doing anything." "We are very careful about who we hire and it doesn't seem like you have a lot of things on your resume that we're looking for. Explain why you even applied for this job." These kinds of questions went on for 45 minutes! Look, I get it, you want to see if I can handle the pressure but I felt totally worthless afterward because even the questions I answered well had a follow up that made me feel stupid. The last interviewer was nicer but still had a similar agenda to get to the bottom of things. After all this I wrote the opportunity off assuming they didn't like me, but HR called to tell me that they did like me and hoped I wasn't put off by some people's "harsh interview tactics." "That's not what it would be like to work here." I was told I would hear within the next two weeks if I got the job or not. I kept following up but two weeks turned to six weeks. Then they asked me if I'd consider a temp-to-hire arrangement. Then they set up an interview with the SVP even though my interviews were supposedly done. Then the day before that interview they cancelled it and said "thanks for your time" with a copy-pasted two line email.... after all that! I had a job at the time and wasn't desperate, but I fell in love with the industry they were in, the role, the office, and the hiring manager and wanted the job so badly from day one that I became naive and ended up wasting tons of time and energy. I don't think they meant for things to go as they did, but HR could have been much more transparent about what they were looking for and where I stood in the process. I have no interest in messing around and they blatantly took steps to lead me on when I wasn't what they wanted.