I applied through a staffing agency. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Elementl in Dec 2023
Interview
A recruiter reached out on LinkedIn and we scheduled a phone screen. The recruiter advanced me to a round with Dagster's head of engineering. Due to scheduling conflicts, I offered to interview during my vacation, to which Dagster's head of engineering agreed. The day before we were scheduled to meet, the interview was delayed. I continued to prepare for the interview while on my vacation. I checked the job description again to review some things, and the position was no longer available. I reached out to the recruiter who confirmed that the position had been filled. Very frustrating, and a little embarrassing that the candidate was the one who discovered the position was no longer available.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Elementl
Interview
3 rounds. Technical (coding, system design), leadership interviews etc. All the interviews went well but the hiring manager kept focusing on my medical leave gap. They were awkward, fidgety, wouldn't maintain eye contact and inexperienced (have managed "Excellence" but not deep/real engineering). I think the engineers are good and they have a good product but they will not be able to scale it (they are stuck with a SQL solution and they do not seem to have the experience or courage to move to a NoSQL solution). They are being hit by support and on-call issues left and right by the clients, so expect to have heavy on-call and client support duties.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Technical (coding, system design), leadership interviews etc.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Elementl (South Euclid, OH)
Interview
I did a couple of interviews, and then they sent me a take-home assignment. After working on and submitting the assignment (within 12 hours of receiving it), I was told they had actually had an offer out to someone already, and the person had accepted. I’m not sure why they made me waste time on the assignment if they knew they weren’t hiring, but I figured maybe they’d keep me in mind for the future.
A few days later, they emailed me and said the person who had accepted the offer had to decline after all, so they would like to move forward with the interview process. I gave my availability, and a few days later they got back to me and said the original candidate was actually able to make it work, so they wouldn’t need me.
A week after that, I got another email saying that the first person truly wasn’t going to be accepting the job. At this point I had reservations about continuing with interviews, but figured young startups don’t always have the most professional process in place. I gave my availability again. Well, I just got an email saying that they have decided to keep searching for candidates who more closely match the job description. I’m sorry, you couldn’t have looked at my resume before recruiting me? Or at any point during all of the cancelling and rescheduling interviews?
I’ve never experienced such an unprofessional and honestly mean interview process. If this is how they treat people, I can’t imagine they’ll be able to keep employees for very long.
