I have now interviewed for three very similar roles on the same team over the last year. All three times the recruiter reached out to me (first via LinkedIn, then directly by phone) AKA I have never actually applied for a job at this company. For the latest role, I had 5 45-minute interviews over 2 weeks with most of the same people who I had spoken to for the previous roles, and exactly one month after the last interview I still had not heard back. I emailed the recruiter, who then called me almost immediately to tell me that they had gone with another candidate. This feels to me like an inappropriately long time to string a candidate along, especially because I had already spoken to all of the team members previously for the first roles they’d had me interview for earlier in the year.
There were a few moments that felt pretty disorganized. Several of my interviews were supposed to be “hybrid” for multiple roles according to the recruiter, but when I got on the call with the interviewers they didn’t seem to know what roles I was interviewing for. Additionally two different recruiters who I spoke to during the process made a point to tell me “don’t worry, most people don’t get the first role they apply for here but if you keep at it you’ll be able to join the team” which struck me as not something to advertise, especially considering they had repeatedly contacted me, and I had never actually applied for a job there. It came off as very self important, since I already have a good job at a good company, which is presumably why they recruited me.
I will not be entertaining any future opportunities here. It seems like the recruiters just have quotas of how many candidates they have to provide, and the whole ordeal has felt like a really pretty big waste of my time in the end. The employees I spoke to were all very kind and interesting, but also literally all repeated some version of “I love this job, but also I’ve never worked this hard in my life and everything is completely hectic” so I think that it probably is a genuinely good company full of good people, but that the employees are all doing multiple peoples jobs right now and are desperate for support. For this same reason I assume that the recruiters are also just completely overwhelmed, as they all seemed to have good intentions.
Overall I had good and honest conversations, but after being asked to interview for three roles with the same people and still not getting an offer it was ultimately a disheartening and kind of insulting process.