After 2 lengthy personality tests, a phone interview and two online video interviews, I still needed to lead a mock conference call with a VP and do an onsite interview with my potential client almost 4 hours away from my house. When I balked at the latter, they ended the process with me. This process is overly lengthy and obtrusive for someone with almost 2 decades experience in outsourced HR.

This interview process was very frustrating and I’m still not sure what exactly happened. I started by submitting a video interview, as requested by the recruiter. I thought this was a bit of a weird technique since it was one-sided, but I went with it. A week or so later I was contacted to set up a phone interview. The phone interview was a typical phone interview where the recruiter asked me questions, told me about the role and the company, etc. Almost four weeks went by and I heard nothing, despite the recruiter saying they would be in touch within a week. I got an email from a different recruiter trying to schedule another call. I politely declined. I got an email and voicemail from yet another recruiter asking me to reconsider. I guess there had been a lot of turnover and things had fallen through the cracks. He said it was the final step in the process and that if it went well, he already had an offer letter typed up ready to go. I figured a conversation couldn’t hurt and decided to schedule the call. The call was terrible. It was the second time I had interviewed and spoken with this VP and she asked me all the same questions, forgot we had talked, was under the assumption I had talked to many other people in the organization and mentioned there were a few steps left in the interview process and she wasn’t sure if I was even qualified because she hadn’t had time to evaluate my resume. The call was supposed to be an hour and it wasn’t even 15 minutes. I reached out to the recruiter to find out where the huge disconnect was. At this point, I was really frustrated and felt like my time was being wasted. After a few days of him mentioning he was working on getting to the bottom of things and then hearing nothing, I sent him an email that I was no longer interested and not to waste his time. What a disappointment - seemed like a great company, but with such a trainwreck of an interview process, I could never convince myself to commit to working for them.