I honestly had a terrible interview process largely due to the senior recruiter I was in contact with. I interviewed for the supply planner position which was based in Panasonic Newark headquarters. My first interview was a normal recruiter call over the phone with a man that had the position of Panasonic senior recruiter and was based in Chicago according to LinkedIn. It went well, and he promptly scheduled an interview with the hiring manager the next week.
My next interview was with the hiring manager over a Teams call. The hiring manager was in charge of managing a team of supply and demand planners for the hand-held devices department (laptops, phones, etc). He was very down to earth, was 10 minutes late to the interview but apologized, took about 30 minutes of our time explaining what the team does and what the position required of me, and then the rest of the time I got to talk about myself and ask him questions. When I asked for the next steps, he said they were trying to hire quickly and therefore this was the last interview to speed up that process. I thanked him and followed up with the recruiter for the next steps.
I followed up with the recruiter through email over the span of 3 weeks after the interview before realizing that the recruiter had ghosted me. On my Jobvite application, it showed the job had closed instead of a rejection which was weird, because the rejection option would have at least prompted me an auto-rejection email. Exactly 1 month after the last interview, the recruiter CALLS me on my phone and tells me he has good news. He said that he talked with the hiring manager and they want to extend me the job offer. By this point, I was really confused but I agreed that I was interested and asked him strictly for a timeline and he says he will get back to me within the next day or two with an offer letter via email as well as a phone call. He didn't get back to me the next day, so I emailed him and he promptly called me and told me it was a system issue on his side and that he's out next Monday and Tuesday but I should have an update on Wednesday. He clearly stated that it wasn't a problem on my end but a problem on his. By next Wednesday he hadn't given me an update and I followed up Wednesday EOD. He finally called me on Thursday at 6pm and told me he's not doing so great and that they decided not to go through with the offer. He explains the team decided to "take another direction" and something like that. He said sorry once, and that was how the call ended. I really wanted to ask why he thought ghosting me for a month was ethical and right. I really wish there was someone else I could talk to about this whole interview process because it was the worst I'd ever experienced.
I would love to give feedback to Panasonic HR about the terrible experience I had with this recruiter. Lack of open communication made it hard for me to communicate with other job recruiters about whether or not I was in the final stage of the interview and I wasn't sure where I stood. It was a huge waste of time and false hope, and I believe this reflects largely on how the organization is run and how its HR department is. I advise everyone to give it a second thought before deciding to work here.
