telephonic interview with hiring manager. Was asked basic questions on work experience and what I was expecting from the role. I was told that I would be contacted by someone for the next round. The HR got back after a week and said they were on a hiring freeze and would get back later. The approach seemed very unprofessional.

A slow and demeaning interview process Applied online and the hiring manager reached out to me to discuss fit and background. After this, I was invited to interview with one of the PMMs in the team I’m applying for. I was given an unofficial case study where I was to talk about their Simulink online marketing and suggest improvements. This round went well as the PMM was very knowledgeable and agreed on the topics/ points I mentioned. And this is when it started going downhill. I had no response for 3 weeks even after me trying to follow up with the hiring manager. I finally emailed the PMM i interviewed with who luckily replied back saying he’d let the hiring manager know and follow up. The hiring manager finally got back saying he wants another 1:1 with me. I thought it was weird considering we already had one but I said sure. Now, we had a call where he basically asked me exact same questions that he asked me during our initial call (which was like a month ago). I ended up reminding him as it’s clear he totally forgot about our initial call. Anyways, I do the interview and I’m told I’m invited to the final round of interview where I’d have to do some team presentation and then a few 1:1s with other stakeholders… these details would be provided by a recruiter. Finally after 2 weeks of no communication, I get an email from the recruiter for discussing final rounds of “Product Marker Engineer” (not PMM) role - I thought this was a typo. So I didn’t think or say much and took the interview where we went over my salary expectations and other HR stuff. He told me he’ll send me a link asking for my availability. At this point, I was busy with other interviews - so I didn’t immediately follow up and when I did, it took this recruiter a total of 2 weeks to get back to me - NOT with a schedule link but with an auto-rejection email!!! One of the worst experiences I ever had. Took way too many weeks - where I was asked to provide free feedback on their website (and suggest improvements to make it more modern), had to do duplicate interviews, then almost got ghosted twice in-between different rounds of interview and ofcourse, finally got rejected without final interview (I.e; after getting invited to the final round) I guess the only good news was that I atleast got auto-rejected before wasting my time having to sit in their final interview (where I had to do extra unpaid work of trying to sell myself with a presentation).