The initial interview was good. The interviewer kept their camera off; I assume they didn't have a great environment to interview in.

Follow-up from the interview was slow. I had to reach out to the recruiter about next steps. The executive recruiter eventually scheduled a call with me a week later.

The recruiter didn't call when they said they would. I had to email to see if they were still going to call. They eventually called and seemed annoyed that I reached out. It turned out this call was only to discuss what the next steps would be, not a follow-up interview. It seemed odd that it took a week to have this conversation when it could have been done earlier.

Afterwards, I provided some availability, and they chose a date two weeks from this call to set up a virtual onsite interview. This interview was scheduled a month and three days after the first interview I had, which is quite a long time for a follow-up.

The virtual onsite was supposed to be over the course of two days: the first day was two hours of interviews, and the second day was four hours. I took PTO for the second day to ensure that I had the time and space available for these interviews. I regret doing this, since it ended up being for naught (more below).

When I joined the call for the first day of virtual onsites, the recruiter didn't join for the first five minutes of the call as scheduled. I thought maybe they were busy, and the two people who were scheduled for the first interview would show up.

They did not.

About seven minutes into the call, I reached out to the recruiter who emailed me the interview schedule to see if I was on the right call. They joined and informed me the position had been filled a week prior, that I had not been notified by the executive recruiter who was on vacation, and that I must have slipped through the cracks.

This is a terrible experience for any of your candidates.

I'm sort of glad that the position closed, since it means I may have dodged a bullet here. I couldn't imagine the difficulty in staffing engineering teams and this happening to candidates.

If I were dependent on the recruiting team, I would be very interested in why this occurred and very motivated to address the problem immediately.

The initial interview asked me questions about my background. It also included a data modeling question that required incremental additions to the initial solution and some consolidation of the model at the end.