phone screen with recruiter, behavioral interview with tech lead, technical interview with a senior engineer, then 4 45 minute technical interviews back to back. All remote. They said they thought I was great but that they didn't have the budget to hire for the position...after 6 interviews, plus a phone screen over 4 weeks. Initially it seemed like they had asked me to apply for a position that they never had the money for to begin with. However, apparently that wasn't entirely the case. After I left this review they got in contact with me so as to leave me with a better impression. They explained that they had the budget for 2 positions and hired both of them while I was interviewing. They decided to finish out my interviews because they thought they could get an advance on next years budget to hire me as well for a 3rd position. Unfortunately that did not end up being possible.

initial phone call with the recruiter. during our call, she did a deep dive on my experience, why I applied, and what I was looking for in a new role. I think she was going through a checklist of questions she asks since the overall interview was very awkward. After answering each of her individual questions, there would be an awkward pause of about 20 seconds, and she would mumble to herself "okay, great, perfect." I don't think I need to explain this, but when you make conversations with a potential candidate so inorganic like that, it gives off a terrible impression of a company. No one likes talking to robots. What makes the experience ever worse is that, the recruiter was ready to end the conversation immediately without letting me ask any questions. I asked questions about the different capabilities of their product, and she literally couldn't answer anything. After the understanding she couldn't answer most of the questions I've prepared, I proceeded to end the conversation to which she replied that the next steps would be to talk to the hiring manager, who she thought would be very interested in speaking with me given my background. Before officially ending the call, she asked for times I'd be available to conduct the video screen with the hiring manager. I sent her times that day. She ended up not responding, so the following day I sent a follow up email. Again, there was no response... it wasn't until the following day (2 days after the original phone call) that she sent a very generic rejection email. Please remember that interviews are an opportunity for a candidate to get to know a company better and that interviewers leave an impression of a company. I've been left with the following two impressions: 1. Their employees know nothing about the product. People aren't very interested in the product. 2. They love to make false promises. Please retrain your interviewers so they dont mislead candidates by asking them to set up next steps in the interview process, ignore candidate emails for a few days, and then send a prompt rejection email with no response. This has been a confusing experienc