These Glassdoor reviews are supposed to be anonymous, but the informative part of my experience with Zillow is pretty specific, so it’ll be obvious to their recruiters who I am. I came up to Seattle after working in San Francisco in the startup scene, and doing a 5 year graduate degree before that. The startup tech scene is volatile, so tenures at companies is shorter than average. I was at a super small start-up for about a year and a half before it went under, than another for about 10 months before my family decided it wanted to move to Seattle for a better life-style. I joined one of the huge tech companies in the area when we moved up here and very quickly learned that it wasn’t for me. An engineering manager at Zillow reached out to me on LinkedIn after I’d been in Seattle for about 8 months. I’d heard good things about work/life at Zillow. I also happen to have a friend that I worked with at a previous company that is a senior engineer there who said good things, so I was happy to talk. We talked on the phone about the company, and found out that I was probably a better fit in a different org, so I was passed off to them. I ended up having coffee with another engineering manager, who was more aligned with my skills and desires, as my screen conversation. It went well. They were the kind of company that I like in size, workflow, and objectives and I was really familiar with their tech-stack, which made it a really easy fit. Between the internal referral I had and the conversation with the manager, they skipped the technical phone interview and just brought me onsite. The onsite was pretty typical; a mix of pure coding questions, system design, ML theory, and ML system design. It was standard stuff, not easy, but appropriate for the senior eng. level for which I was applying. The feedback I got was really great, and everyone was very nice. I had a pretty good experience overall. The direct feedback I got from my recruiter was that I did really well in all technical aspects of the onsite interviews. Their process then involved a quick 30min-1hour conversation with a director/VP as a validation. This is where it got weird. The recruiter warned me that the VP was going to ask me about my employment history, and why my tenure was short at my previous companies. Now, remember, Zillow contacted me, I didn’t apply; I spend some time at two start-ups, and I was in grad-school for half a decade before that. I had never been in an interview where, from word one, I was sure the interviewer was dead-set against me and actively trying to come up with reasons I should fail, but that’s what happened. I was basically grilled about why I was interviewing with Zillow, like I had to justify talking with them after they had reached out to me. There was a lot of soft-skills questions, which is normal, but the tone was that the interviewer assumed I was a terrible person to work with, and was trying to find out what was wrong with me. If someone has made up their mind about you before you even speak, I’m not sure there is some specific arrangement of words that will overcome their biases. But no, it got weirder. I was emailed by the recruiter and asked for some time to come back into the office for two, one hour long, interviews with two different VPs. I was confused, but agreed. I came in a few days after. When I came back into the office, I was told that the VPs I was supposed to interview with were unavailable and I was going to talk with the same VP I had talked with on the phone. This was the same person I had already spent a strange hour on the phone with. The conversation was basically a repeat of the previous one, except in this one they straight-up asked me why I would quit Zillow. I had to somehow come up with hypothetical reasons why I would quit their company. I don’t know what anyone else would do in that situation, but I really didn’t have an answer. There was radio silence for two weeks, not even a polite rejection email. Then, when I was on vacation, I got a call from the recruiter again. They tried to be nice by saying that they didn’t have the budget to hire someone at my level, that they wanted principal level people right now, and that they might call me back at the start of the next fiscal year, but that seemed like it was probably cover. This was several months ago, and I didn’t really want to air dirty laundry, but then again it does seem like this kind of experience is what places like Glassdoor are for. I have nothing but good things to say about the people I interacted with, but if they have very senior people with particulars about not hinging people who worked at at startups, then it would have been better if they had not put me through this. I think they just need some better communication between their hiring manager and the recruiting org so that they can figure out what their filtering criteria and/or desired head-count is.