I contacted the recruiter and soon received a phone call from the company. After three phone screens in less than ten days, I was scheduled for an onsite interview. They agreed to reimburse the costs, but since the interview, they have been silent.

The onsite interview was supposed to be with five people, but it was cut short to only four. The excuse was that the final interviewer had an emergency come up. In hindsight, it seems they had already decided not to hire me, even though I thought I performed relatively well.

Most of the interviewers seemed very professional, except one, whose body language and facial expression suggested I was wasting her time.

The recruiter was silent after the interview until I pinged her for an update. She told me that I was not a fit because the team was looking for a very specific candidate.

In hindsight, the statement from the recruiter and from some other reviewers cannot be more accurate: the company is looking for a very specific skill set and is not looking for anything remotely like a generalist. The position I applied for was in mapping and logistics, and they seemed to expect me to know all the algorithms in computational geometry. My friends who were hired by a different team in the company were hired because they knew exactly what the team was looking for. It looks like people were hired to solve problems that already exist, not the ones that will come up in the future.

In other words, the company's hiring demeanor is very short-sighted.