Loved the recruiter - she was very communicative, responsive, and friendly. The only thing that was off to me was when the recruiter told me to talk to the hiring manager about the salary requirement (I told her that their max was still too low for me). The hiring manager, however, impacted my candidate experience in a negative way. The whole interview was just for me to solve their business problems (lots of use cases) while the hiring manager took notes, and that was it. Throughout the interview, the hiring manager kept saying she just wanted me to start tomorrow to solve some of the business problems, which seemed to be a good sign. She also seemed very interested in hearing my approaches to the problems and gave me lots of positive feedback. The interview ended up running over and the hiring manager didn’t leave me any time to ask her questions. Two days later, the recruiter told me they went with someone else. Overall, it felt like the hiring manager was just looking for free consulting. Definitely not the best candidate experience and contradicts their “people first” culture.