I first had a recruiter phone call where we discussed my background, experience, and interest in the role. Two days later, I received a take-home coding assignment that tested both problem-solving and practical implementation skills. After submitting the assignment, I was informed within a few days that the company had already hired someone for the position. Although the outcome wasn’t positive, I appreciated that the recruiter took the time to personally call and update me about the decision.

Recruiter was late and all of his questions were things that could have been answered by even a casual skimming of my résumé. After the third one of those I asked him if he'd even looked at it and he insisted that he had. About five more absolutely pointless questions later he doubled back and admitted that he hadn't, offering "I just go back from an offsite" as some kind of excuse for not preparing at all. I made a good faith effort to ask him some really basic cultural questions but he was fundamentally incapable of answering any of them and just drove off on some wild tangent about how Doximity's IPO went and how they're going to be acquiring a bunch of other companies soon over and over and over as this material was clearly the only thing he'd actually rehearsed. I was really glad when the 30 minutes was up so I could close the Google Meet tab and go do something productive with my time.