The candidate experience is terrible.
Overall, there is no recruiter to gauge the match of the candidate and the hiring manager contacted me directly with phone, scheduled a zoom call with short notice (in 2 days). There were total 3 people in the call, there was one interviewer behaved very rudely that I have never been mistreated in this way in my 7 years of career and countless interviews.
First, as I said, since there were no recruiter or recruiting coordinator for the role, the hiring manager only called me and send a zoom invite for the position, so right after I followed up with an email to the hiring manager asking what the call will cover, he did not reply and it left me very little information of the whole process and position. The scheduled call was an hour with three interviewers, after we talked through about the role, my background, I asked whats the expectation of this position, is this a replacement or new hire, the hiring manager replied that the new hire quitted after joining for a short period so they are looking for a replacement. That might be the reason they are urgent to hire someone and recruiter is skipped. I don't know but it was a red flag to me.
The three interviewers threw questions here and there, and I did not know what to expect for an hour call. When we were walking through the experience on my resume, one of the interviewers (the only rude one) interrupted: I have a lot of questions about your experience, well, I have questions for every project you put on your resume. (My resume is bullet point style with each project maximum having two lines) She asked the details of the first project from my recent company, I explained on a high level as I did not know how lengthy of an answer they expected, and she said 'Well I am not convinced the reason why you are choosing this technology, and this is a very complicated project, I don't know why you can put it in just 2 lines, but I will go ahead.' (Isn't scheduling the interview call the reason to go through project and experience in details? Do you expect a resume with a novel?)
Then another interviewer kept asking other questions. This is actually a very common resume format and she could ask me for follow up if she wanted to! There are 3 interviewers in my first interview call, and everyone was asking a lot of questions unorganizedly, jumping here to there, I understand a lot of interviewers just glanced the resume first time when they are interviewing, but not reviewing (by either recruiter or hiring manager) before moving forward to interview is a total waste of time to both sides.
Then it came the biggest thing that put me off: I was asked about whether I like mentoring juniors and my mentoring style, I answered the generic senior mentor process, she interrupted again: (My name), I don't know what you are saying, mentoring and training is always a big headache (she mentioned 'headache' three times at least), they always make mistakes, made a mess etc. The attitude of she was terrible. Disagreement happens a lot, I might not be the ideal candidate but an interviewer should at least treat candidate with respect. If what she said was true, that she found mentoring and training people are a headache and she hates them making mistakes, this is definitely fostering a toxic working environment in the company.
I am not disappointed with the decision they are not moving forward because I have two offers with better people and team, but strongly think that I need to let your company know about the candidate experience I went through so your company can provide trainings for employees.
This is the most rude, toxic and unreasonable interview experience I have ever had.
