1. Applied on Indeed.com.
2. Recruiter reached out for an initial screening interview and submitted feedback to the hiring manager.
3. Interview with the hiring manager.
4. Moved up to the interview loop.
5. Total of 5 interviews as part of the loop, including technical (IC level) and management interviews, split into 2 days:
   • Technical interviews focused on different types of manual and automated testing.
   • Mentorship interview.
   • Management interview.
   • Closing interview, mostly about how everything went.

I'm sure the overall intent behind the interview structure is well, however, I don’t think it necessarily helped the hiring manager make a well-informed decision. Why? Because no one who interviewed me while in the loop was on the hiring team itself.

I was given a chance at the end of every interview to ask questions, but no one could answer them effectively. Because, guess what, no one was actually part of the hiring team, so the answers were very generic and did not help me that much, especially when different teams at Indeed have very different team structures, technology, and methodologies.

I felt it wasn’t fair to either the hiring manager or the candidate. I understand whoever doesn’t get an offer tends to provide negative feedback, but to their defense, the interviews were well-intended but did not work even for them.

I kind of lost interest on the second day of the interview. That was the day of the management round, which was essentially a repeat of my initial interview with the hiring manager. That annoyed me a bit and hence may have affected my performance.

Many companies do the loop, but the hiring team interviews the candidate and gives the candidate a chance to know the team.

Management interview:

Very generic, boilerplate questions:

• My management style
• How would you motivate a low-performing employee?