I applied online. The process took 2 months.

I scheduled a call with the recruiter, but when the time for it came, no one called. I instead received an email from the recruiter 10 minutes after the scheduled time saying he had been "pulled into an urgent meeting just now." We rescheduled for Friday afternoon of the following week, but again when the time came no one called. About 15 minutes after the agreed-upon time, I received an email from the recruiter saying he had the flu. He requested my availability for Monday, and I provided a 6-hour window. The interview confirmation I received was for a time outside of the availability window I had given, but at least this time around the recruiter actually called. It was a pretty standard recruiter screen, and it seemed to go well. The recruiter told me he would be meeting with the hiring team within the next couple of days and would get back to me with an update by the end of the week. I followed up early the next week when I hadn't received an update, and then again the following week when my first follow-up didn't receive a response. I didn't directly receive a response to my second follow-up, but the day after I did receive a boilerplate rejection email from a generic address.

The recruiter's general incompetence made me wonder if my application had ever even made it to the right person, so I figured out who the hiring manager was and messaged him directly on LinkedIn. He confirmed that my resume had made it to his inbox, but said that he had probably "screened it out quickly" because I hadn't listed the tech stack for each of my previous roles, and thus it was not sufficiently clear to him that I had Rails experience. FWIW, Ruby and Rails are both listed in the skills section at the end of my resume; no other languages or frameworks are listed. My cover letter also discussed both my familiarity with engineering blog posts on Rails topics and a specific example of a project I had done involving deep knowledge of Rails, but doubtless the hiring manager didn't actually read the cover letter. Apparently, he just expected "Ruby on Rails" to be plastered in all caps all over the resume. Anyway, the job seemed interesting, but given that all my actual interactions with people at the company were negative, I'm not really disappointed about not getting the job.

I don't specifically remember what the recruiter asked me. It was all generic recruiter screen stuff, basically making sure I didn't blatantly lie on my resume and that I have the kind of background that would be a fit for the role, such as making sure I have Rails experience.

Why did I spend 25 minutes on the phone talking about my previous experience if that information wasn't going to be passed along to the hiring manager, who instead used the "glance at the resume for 5 seconds and default to 'no' if I don't see exactly what I expect" heuristic to do his own screening? That's a good question. If I was involved in hiring at Gusto, I would probably make some changes to that process.