This was probably the most disorganized, disrespectful interview process I've ever been through. Start to finish, it took two and a half months. Two. And a half. Months. This included several lapses in communication from the recruiter, who would offer to schedule a phone call and then disappear for week, with me nagging every few days with "just checking in!" messages like a desperate and neglected date. We finally made it through the screening call, so there was another call with my hiring manager, who promptly forgot about it, leaving me anxiously looking at my phone and waiting for it to ring. Dude, people get NERVOUS FOR INTERVIEWS. They psych themselves up. They start staring at the phone ten minutes before the interview time. Every minute someone is late, the interviewee gets exponentially more nervous. MAYBE DON'T GHOST THEM.
More scheduling snafus ensure and I make it through THAT call, plus one more, and I'm then invited downtown for an in-person interview. The downtown interview is a four-hour affair, during which I'm interviewed in 30-minute blocks by different people from several departments. At least three of those people had no idea why they were interviewing me, so we just chit chatted. They were pretty cool. Between getting there and back, and the interview itself, I had to take the whole day off work.
After all that, it went to someone else. No big deal, right? Except when I thanked the recruiter and asked him if he'd feel comfortable sharing any feedback that I could grow from, he was like, "Honestly, it just went to someone with more experience. The person who got it had ten years of experience in blah blah blah plus five years of blah blah blah..." so that's not even in the same BALLPARK as my experience level (five years total) and I don't know, maybe they could have figured that one out before yanking me around for two and a half months. Good God, HomeAway. I wanted to love you. Just let me love you. WE COULD HAVE BEEN SO GOOD TOGETHER.
My one consolation is that driving home from their downtown office in 5:00 traffic made me want to stick a fork in my eye, so at least I won't be dealing with that. HomeAway still sounds like a great company to work for, but I wish they'd treat their applicants as well as they seem to treat their employees. If you have the patience and humbleness to get through their flaky process, then you deserve to work there. You probably deserve better than that.