What. A. Mess. If this isn't how you would describe my experience, please enlighten me. I work in tech and regularly work with in-house recruiters so I know how slammed recruiting teams can be in fast-growing businesses, and that they sometimes have to prioritize other roles like engineering. Still, the whole process felt especially sluggish. I had a call with a recruiter, then the "hiring manager" (actually a consultant for the company because it's a new role), then followed by a portfolio review where thing started to go really wrong. The only designer that would have reported to the role and have experience with branding was one of the 3 on the call, except he never showed up for the Zoom call! So you can imagine after showing them my brand development work (brand book and examples of execution), it was quite over their heads in terms of how to evaluate it. It showed when they kept asking for more design executions instead of diving into the brand book, the development process, or rollout process. On top of that, if I recall correctly, the other 2 were product/visual designers calling in from New York and China, making it like 6pm for one and 4am for the other. You can imagine the energy level on that call. 2 days later, the recruiter emailed me that she hoped to give me an update in a few days, which turned into a little over 3 weeks with a "thanks for applying" email. You'd think that's the end of it. Almost a month later, the recruiter emailed and wanted to reconnected, saying that with "other business priorities, [they] had placed the role on hold given [their] small recruiting team." "However, ...now is a good time for us to add a CD to the team and we wanted to see if you are still interested in considering us as we see you as a great fit for the role." I asked for next steps, and was informed I'll be meeting with the design team and then the founder. I said I have already met with a design team, and that was the end. But who knows!