Applied on Linkedin and was contacted a few days after, we scheduled a teams call, I thought I was talking with HR first before moving to the actual interview stage but surprisingly the hiring manager also joined the call, the whole time she did not have her camera on. Chatted for about an hour and they said they will get back to me on next steps soon. A few days after I got woken up by text messages in the morning at 8 am saying they want to meet at 11am, very last minute but I decided to take it, talked with more team members but from the convo, it seemed very "start up" toy company, they asked some standard interview questions, but also very specific questions regarding sales strategies in the mass channel.
I went through with the interview and was told afterward in a private conversation with the HR that they wanted to extend an offer by Friday, I thanked them and patiently waited for the offer that never came. Turned out they actually backed out and decided to interview with one of the reference contacts I provided, which was very shocking to me as I have never had any company do that in any of the interview processes in my life! Total waste of time and very unprofessional, and in the last call they scheduled to give me an update, the topics of "you might have intimidated people" and that I might have "changed" my resume to be picked just because my work experience is a perfect match to their JD, I WAS SPEECHLESS at the end, to say the least.
It is quite a learning experience with this interview process and this is probably really a manifestation of how their organization runs inside, really says "people are disposable" without saying it, I'm glad this only took 2 weeks and that I dodged a bullet just in time.
