First, the call was with a company representative, and then soon after set up a remote interview a week later to meet the team and have a remote technical and behavioral interview.
The remote interview consisted of a few people from the development team. Typical software developer/behavioral questions while explaining what they do as a company and how their everyday usually pans out. Mostly talking about their lifecycle, what their teams consisted of, different applications, and languages/software used for those applications. Overall, the whole interview went well, and felt confident about moving on to the next step.
Another week later, I was contacted by the company and was informed that the team was impressed with my skills and background and that the company wanted to move forward to the next step in the interview process, which was a developer programming test. There was no time frame to complete the programming assignment but did not want to take a lot of time to complete it. Ended up completing and submitting the test roughly a week later. The next day, I got an email from the company stating that they wanted to set up a call with me to discuss the next steps of the interview.
Once on the call, they stated that they would like to offer me the position due to my skill set and that the interviews and programming assessment went very well. They then asked, "What was my salary range for accepting the position?" I responded and asked, "What was the salary range for the position that was listed online since there's no salary listed for the developer position on Glassdoor?". They responded (roughly), "It's hard for me to give you an answer because most of our new employees are fresh college grads and I wouldn't know what range to say based on your years of experience."
After around 5 minutes of listening to them fumbling over their words, they kept refusing to give me a salary range for the position. So I then looked online for comparable prices for developer salaries in the area with my number of years of experience. So I asked them again, "What salary range does this job provide for the position?" They continued to stall stating they did not know and that I probably wouldn't like the salary that's given to fresh college grads. At this point, I'm fed up and annoyed that they are constantly refusing to give me an answer. They were refusing to give me any salary number or range and stated instead that I give them a salary range first.
Since I thought that was my only option, I stated to the company a salary range that was a little bit on the higher end but not unreasonable based on my current years of experience and expertise thinking that this would be a salary negotiation deal since they never stated a salary range to me at all. They then basically said thank you and that they will need to talk to management and will be in touch within the next few hours to the next day. After waiting for over 24 hours since the call, I finally received an email back from them stating "Thank you for applying... Our team was impressed with your expertise...Due to your salary range and timing, hiring you is not going to work out."
Confused because I thought I would negotiate salary, I called the company, left a message, emailed, and called back again to find out why the sudden denial after 3 weeks of constant interviewing and coding, but got no response in terms of a returned phone call. Just an "I'll let management know you called and get back to you soon." email response. The next and final response I received that same day was a rejection template email stating "Thank you for your interest but we have decided to move in a different direction at this time."
To anyone applying to any position, no matter what company, please be sure to let the company state their salary range FIRST when they are trying to offer you the job. Everything went well with the whole interview process and had a great time meeting with the team. I gladly would have accepted any salary I was offered, but they never gave me a salary nor a salary range I could even try to accept, let alone get close to when giving them my salary range. If my range was too high, they should've just told me over the phone call when we were discussing salary and that the company does not negotiate salaries at all. I was very committed to accepting anything I was offered by the company because I really liked everyone there and what the company did and stood for.
I have nothing but great things to say about the whole staff from the interview. The whole experience was completely great and positive until it was ruined by confusion, a lack of clarification, and poor communication at the end of the process to accept the job offer.
