Applied and received an invitation to interview, only to find the first step is a 30-minute unpaid pre-employment assessment: a personality questionnaire plus an aptitude test, before any human interaction takes place. The assessment cannot be paused once started, so you're expected to block off uninterrupted time with zero flexibility. After that, candidates who pass are funneled into a self-paced video interview, followed (if selected again) by live team interviews. While Sovos frames this as "reducing bias," in practice it front-loads significant candidate effort with no reciprocal investment from the company. There's no opportunity to learn about the role or ask questions until much later in the process. For candidates balancing jobs or other commitments, this structure is a poor use of time and signals that the company values its own screening efficiency over basic respect for applicants. The irony is that this approach likely filters out strong, in-demand candidates who simply won't jump through hoops, while remaining completely susceptible to low-quality applicants who use AI tools to breeze through automated assessments and video interviews.