I applied for the account manager and customer success advocate roles on Lumen's site. As soon as I finished applying I already had a link sent to me for a pre-recorded video interview process; because only one of the job descriptions had mentioned this as a possibility, my assumption was that this was only intended for one of the positions. I took some time to think over going through with this process as I'm extremely uneasy about the idea of getting dressed up for an interview that does not give me the opportunity to ask questions and learn more about the company, using technology that, I later learned, has been repeatedly criticised for use of AI screening to filter people out based on trivial and inconsequential appearance and body language reasons. While I thought it over, Lumen persistently emailed and texted me twice a day for 3 days until I finally went ahead with the process.
This took the form of 6 generic questions that gave me no insight into the company and 3 "games" that stretched the definition of the word to its breaking point- one particularly frustrating instance was a game in which I was made to pick from two mystifyingly abstract stock images which was more like me, which I was required to do, staggeringly, over 100 times. My laptop's camera light remained on through all of this, which leads me to wonder if I was still being recorded while doing these extremely exasperating and not at all related tasks.
After all was said and done, I still continued to get pings about the video interview until I ultimately had to block the communication- I emailed HR asking why I was continuing to receive these, to which I still have received no response. I have since come to the conclusion that they actually wanted me to do the same process for both roles I applied for for some reason, and I have already decided I will never again do one of these insultingly depersonalized and downright invasive video interviews without very good reason (Lumen tries to frame this bizarre and impersonal choice as a benefit to you as the applicant, giving you the chance to interview anywhere and anytime, and not simply an opportunity to offload work from actual humans and the time and effort spent on properly screening applicants to an automated system.) On top of all this, I received an email this morning informing me that the position I did all this for was no longer being requisitioned for (even though the listing is still up on their site!) Fed up, I attempted to cancel my other application as I no longer wanted anything to do with this company, and after thoroughly searching was completely unable to find a way to do so.
Quite simply: don't waste your time with a company that operates like this. If it's this messy and opaque before you even get in I can't imagine what it's like working here.
