"Stalking" recruiter emails. ➡️ Recruiter call and initial alignment. ➡️ Signing NDA. ➡️ System design presentation. ➡️ Backend interview. ➡️ Rejection. My last interview round was full of red flags. Before my last interview, I was asked to complete a questionnaire about the preferred stack. I chose Node.js. I indicated that I didn't have a preference for which interview, frontend- or backend-focused, should go first. The recruiter reached out specifically to get my choice on that 😅 The interviewer asked the "Where are you?" question before even turning his camera on. After hearing, "In California," he double-pressed, "No, where are you located? I see you're not in an office." 🚩 Then, he shared a link to a place with some pseudo-Rails code. I expressed that I had chosen a different stack. To which he replied, "Oh, [the recruiter] and [the director] had a miscommunication about this. We can re-schedule it if you are not ready." Am I? 🚩 I responded with humor that the last thing one would want is to signal a potential employer that they are not ready. I embraced the challenge (Why not? I've worked with Rails since version 1.2.4), and we continued. The interviewer issued several compliments along the way, like "You are way more senior than I, and I like how you approach this and that," which on the spot sounded as if to soften the kiss-off. 🚩 Even though I never applied for the position, after this weird round, I received an ATS robo-rejection email thanking me for my interest in the role. "Unfortunately, we won’t be moving forward with your application." 🚩 And that was it. It left me puzzled, though. When exactly did I apply for the position? 🤔

Applied online. Quick chat with recruiter, quick chat with hiring manager, basic coding interview with 2 engineers on coderpad, then scheduled 4 more interviews for: Coding, System Design, Product, and meeting with Director of Engineering. Early in the process the recruiter also sent me some links to do Predictive Index's Behavior and Cognitive assessments. The recruiter mentioned there was no rush on these, they mostly just needed to be done before the final stages of the hiring process. For the most part scheduling and early interactions were done quickly. Chatting with the hiring manager was nice and got to learn about the position and projects. The coding interview was pretty basic but generally fine. From there things were a little bit messy, the 2nd coding interview was structed as a Ruby on Rails problem, but in coderpad it wasn't actually setup in a Rails app. This was fine just a little unrealistic in how you would actually solve the problem because you don't have all the tools of the framework. Other than that it was an easy test. It did feel a little thrown together last minute though rather than something they might have prepared for candidates properly. After that I met with a Director of product. This was fairly straightforward, we discussed things related to how engineering and product work together. He did show up to this call 5-10 minutes late. Immediately after I had a call with a Director of Engineering. Like the previous chat, he also showed up about 10 minutes late. This was a little annoying considering you're taking hours out of your day to get these interviews done. This chat was pretty basic, just talking about some previous experiences dealing with specific situations. He seemed slightly distracted, but I get it he's probably a super busy guy. But that on top of being late wasn't a great look. Finally the next day I had the System Design interview. Except I showed up, waited 10 minutes on Zoom thinking "Okay I guess it's just normal that everyone shows up late, but just in case let me email the recruiter/interview coordinator". I let them know that I'd been in the call for 10 minutes and the interviewer hadn't shown up and that I'd give it another 5 or 10 minutes just in case and if not we could reschedule. They never showed up and I didn't hear back from the recruiter for over a day only to be told that they decided to move forward with another candidate instead. I don't mind if they didn't think things went well during part of this process, but just not showing up to a scheduled interview and then not saying anything about it is pretty sloppy and unprofessional. Some feedback for Spring Health would be... make sure everyone that does interviews is properly prepared and trained, and try to make sure the prioritize showing up on time (or at least within a few minutes, having 2 people show up 10 minutes late and one not at all is not great). Or at least on the scheduling side make sure everyone has enough buffer between their meetings so that they have time in case certain things run long that they don't run over other meetings.