After a few initial emails with the recruiter, we scheduled a 30-minute intro call just to touch base on the process. Following the scheduling, I received an itinerary for our initial call.

The recruiter was about 10 minutes late to the initial call and offered an apology, citing personal matters. It wouldn't have been a big deal, but he then stated that the call was going to have to be cut short since he had another scheduled call in 20 minutes.

The call began with a few basic questions about my work history and experience, as is typical for intro calls. Then, he mentioned they were looking for someone quickly and that this would also need to be a technical pre-assessment call. I wasn't really prepared for this, as it wasn't on the itinerary, but I was ready to proceed even though we only had about 10 minutes left.

After about four questions that didn't really relate to the job I would be doing, he realized he had the wrong set of questions for me. With only three minutes left, he found the correct ones. In those three minutes, the tone shifted from "we're going to have to move on to the next question" halfway through an answer to "wow, there are a lot of questions here, we're just going to have to stop here."

He said he would make some notes, which I thought would include the issues: his lateness, asking the wrong questions, and not allowing enough time to answer the right ones. Instead, he got back to me a few days later saying the hiring manager had decided to move forward with someone else.

I acted professionally and understanding throughout the entire interaction; it sounded like he was having a rough day.

Either way, I'm not sure if it was sabotage or what it was, but it didn't seem like the "Google Way" you always hear about. Hopefully, he doesn't conduct interviews like that with all his candidates.

What is the process called for removing the top of a stack?