Round 1 - Recruiter Round 2 - Hiring Manager - Head of Support Round 3 - Customer Success Round 4 - Customer Support Manager Round 5 - HR Round 6 - VP of Customer Success Nothing but positive feedback throughout the entire interview process until I am informed that they hired a guy with some engineering experience instead. Sounds straightforward, right? Except the job description did not include a mention of a specific engineering background required. Hiring manager specifically said that my experience is perfectly in line with what this job required. There was no technical assignment. There was no interview with anyone from engineering. There were no concerns raised that I am lacking the engineering background required for the role at any stage of the lengthy interview process. When I raised my justified objections over hiring decision, i.e. ‘How can you decide based on a requirement that wasn’t disclosed or evaluated?’ the recruiter snapped that she doesn’t owe me feedback at all. Unbelievably unfair, time-wasting, misleading and sexist. Do better, Forter.

I came across the role, which was based in the UK, on the Otta Platform, and did a deep research into what the company was about. Found it to be doing amazing things in the Cybersecurity space and was thrilled as I wanted to break into the Cybersecurity field. I first had a call with their Senior Recruiter, who explained what the job was, where it would be, and some basic information. I was thrilled to advance to the second round which was conducted by their Technical Support Team Lead, who gave me a task on the call to answer 3 questions pertaining to bash scripting and Python. Less than a week later, I was given a take home assignment, which gave me further hope that they were looking at me as a serious candidate. I completed the task a day before I had to submit. And then it was radio silence for about 3 weeks. After multiple follow ups, the Senior Recruiter got back to saying, they had a serious rethink about which location they wanted to hire the person for. They said they had relocated the vacancy from London to Tel-Aviv, and was no longer considering me as a client. This felt like a gut punch, because I feel like was strung along for their amusement. My further follow up regarding proper feedback on the assignment I had done, they gave me a good response on it. All in all, I feel like they could have been serious about role before taking in prospective candidates, just for them to drop the entire process.