A Talent Acquisition rep reached out to me via LinkedIn, indicating that they wanted to talk to me about a Javascript Engineer position. I responded (via LinkedIn) that I was interested in the position. After not hearing back for over a week I contacted the rep directly (their email address was listed publicly).
The rep responded within minutes to let me know that she didn't handle the Javascript Engineer position and that she would pass my resume off to the correct person. I was included on the hand-off / handshake email. The new rep responded almost immediately and requested that I re-send my resume (even though the hand-off email included all of my LinkedIn details and a copy of my resume).
After some back-and-forth to confirm that the phone number listed on my resume (the same number that appeared in the signature of all of my emails) was the best number to reach me, we scheduled a phone call for later in the week. The phone call was simply to confirm that I was interested in the previously-discussed Javascript Engineer position and that I was capable of writing "non-jQuery" Javascript. With those points established we scheduled a second phone call with an engineer for the following week.
When the engineer called, he hadn't seen my resume and knew nothing about me other than my name and that he was to quiz me on all things Javascript. The first few questions were straight-forward; "what's the difference between 'var x = 0' and 'x = 0'". Subsequent questions were vague and covered some broad topics, "describe closures", "describe a couple design patterns", etc.
After the quiz we talked about the range of products & tools teams worked on as well as the way Spotify constructs its teams. Because the engineer knew nothing about me or which position I was interviewing for, he couldn't provide any detail about the team or product I'd be working on.
Why was I contacted by someone about a position they had no control over? Why did I have to wait 3 days to have a 5 minute phone call just to verify that I was applying for the position they had contacted me about? Why hadn't the interviewing engineer been given a copy of my resume and been told which position I was interviewing for? While everyone I spoke to was friendly, there was a general air of disinterest. The entire process felt muddled and impersonal which is unfortunate, considering that the process was started when the company reached out to me.
