After an initial screening call with the recruiter, I was told there would be around four additional interview stages. I was then invited to an interview with the hiring manager and another person on his team. They both introduced themselves and then indicated that I would be asked questions about my previous roles before they would discuss the position in more detail. At first, I thought the questions would be dynamic depending on my responses, but instead, they repeated a scripted long list of boring questions for each role that took nearly an hour! These included questions like, "What was one project you worked on in this role that you are proud of and why, what was one challenge you overcame, what was one thing you would do differently, who was your manager (name and title), what was their main strength, what was their main weakness, what would they say is your main strength, what would they say is your main weakness, why did you leave your role and what did you gain in the next role that you couldn't find in your previous role."
The questions were so dry and lacked any real conversational quality, that I realized the interviewer was quickly losing my interest. While one interviewer repeated the same questions for each role, the other person took notes. After an hour of answering the same dry question for my previous five roles, I still knew nothing about the role I was interviewing for other than what I had read in the job description. Since they purposely scheduled 90 minutes for this first interview, which I felt was excessive given this was only the first of four rounds, they used the last 30 minutes to finally tell me more about the position, However, by this point, I had lost so much energy and motivation, that I was barely able to focus. They also left me with little time to ask any questions which did not help.
After the interview ended, I realized this was not the type of team I wanted to work with and decided to withdraw my application the next day. My decision was purely based on the hiring team's lack of self-awareness in conducting a very long, dry and unappealing interview which completely turned me off. As someone who's been through many interviews in the last twenty years, this was by far the most painful one I had to endure.
Things that should have been done differently include reducing the first interview round to only one hour and spending less time asking about projects in previous positions. So maybe focus on the last two or three roles instead of the last five. This way, candidates can be left with at least ten minutes to ask questions about the role so they can have an actual conversation rather than feeling like their time isn’t being valued.
