I applied online, and the process took five months. By far, this has been the worst interview experience I have ever had in my life.

First, I passed the interview with the hiring manager.

• Then I passed the technical and behavioral rounds, which didn’t include coding.
• There was one more talk with the hiring manager because he wanted to clarify a couple of things regarding my preferences.

After that, they kept silent for a while, but then the recruiter who was working with me at the time said they were going to provide feedback within a week. In about two days, I got a standard rejection notification from Workday. It would have been okay, and I would have forgotten about it almost momentarily, if the director of their recruitment department hadn’t reached out to me and said that they did it by mistake. Also, she told me that the recruiter who was working with me previously had already left the company and moved to another country. Now they have new rules, and their new CTO requires everyone to pass a coding session. "Fine, it is a red flag, but anything might happen," I thought, and I accepted their invite, which came in two or three weeks after our talk.

I passed the interview. The interviewers told me a different story that they needed extra information to make up their mind and that this was the coding session, with no CTO at all in this version. The recruiter followed up with a note that the feedback was positive and requested me to provide two references. At this stage, you would think that they already made an internal decision, but it turns out that they didn't. Because after long and really exhausting video calls with the people who gave positive feedback about me, they ghosted me.

In 1.5 months, I reached out regarding the updates on my process. The recruiter answered that she had sent a rejection notification with Workday, which she didn't, and that they were not going forward with my candidacy. After I asked for a reasoning behind the decision, her answer was that they thought that sometime during the interview process, I would not take on their input even when my answer was incorrect. She added that this way of working wouldn't work well in this team as collaboration and adopting others' ideas are required, and that the reference also confirmed that you wouldn’t change your mind on things. Which is just a more impolite way to say that I am not a team player. What in the world is even this?

It is so ridiculous that I didn’t even have any words to say to express the confusing feeling that I had. After all six stages and reference checks, you are saying that I am not a team player? And you didn’t understand it before doing long and exhausting calls with the people I know personally very well and who talked nothing but positive things about me? They wasted my time and energy, and even more importantly, the time and energy of the people I know personally very well and worked with, just to ghost me afterwards and then reject me with a ridiculous reason. Evidently, they’ve just found someone cheaper and came up with this made-up reason because it seems like lying is what they are used to doing and this is how they treat people. This is such a disrespectful attitude from all perspectives. It has turned out I dodged a bullet because it seems that their processes and internal relations are pure chaos.

Nothing was complicated. There were just questions about Spark and how it works internally. There was a question on how I choose between different approaches at work, such as tradeoffs and others. The unexpected coding session was more like a code review session in reality.