The process consisted of 3 interviews: one impromptu 15 minute phone call (less than an hour after sending an initial email inviting me for a preliminary screening), a virtual interview with the same person and another member of the team, and an onsite interview with - you guessed it - the same person and one additional team member. There were 4 employees scheduled for the onsite (including the CEO) and no mention about why they weren't in the interview the day of. Whatever, scheduling mishaps happen and it's not out of the ordinary to have a less than perfect system in place if you've never had a recruiter on staff to help establish one (or so they said - based on reviews they HAVE had a dedicated recruiter before). They asked me to prepare a presentation for the onsite detailing a recruiting project I spearheaded to walk them through. A waste of my time as they never asked to see it. What they DID ask for though, was free work. And I should've said no. They asked me to do a "mock search" for a role they just happened to have opened at the time and were having a no luck filling. After I showed them how I would approach the search in LinkedIn Recruiter and pointed out the very first candidate was pretty much a perfect fit, they asked me to draft a sample InMail. Why did I not just walk out at this point? Recruiter roles and few and far between right now and I was hoping against hope they'd turn out to be on the up and up. Welp, satisfied with my message, they asked me to send it to the candidate using their coworker’s signature. I clicked the send button, and as the InMail flew off into the ether, it took along with it all my expectations for this role. Luckily, that was the last thing they wanted from me. I packed up and drove home and haven't heard from them since. This was in early April 2025; as of June the recruiter role is pulled down and I don't see anyone with that title working there. Lesson learned; I will never do free work again, but I doubt they will hesitate to pull a move like this in the future. Some other gems: -They don't have a dedicated HR person or advisor even though they are hovering around 100 employees. -When I asked how a recruiter would assimilate into the team, it turned out they were basically looking for a glorified recruiting coordinator; they felt their current processes were solid and just needed someone to source, screen, and schedule. -As they were having trouble with engineering roles specifically, I asked if they'd be open to hybrid/remote roles since so many companies offer that as an option, and they responded that anyone that doesn't want to work onsite 5 days per week "probably wouldn't be a culture fit anyway"