Screen call with recruiter following with 1 hour phone call with hiring manager. I was curious why it wasn't a zoom or video call with the hiring manager when we started the interview, I felt if we are going to spend one hour talking we should be able to see one another. The Hiring Manager declined politely. He then started talking and kept doing so for about 25 minutes about the specificities of the role, Most of that information was already available in the job description. The it was some behavioral questions on Management, tell me about a time... What makes a good Engineer. At no point I felt a real interest of the manager in my experience, and more focused on going through the list of questions he had for me. Lastly I was given less than 5 minutes to ask some questions, I asked what would the person coming in this role need to focus on to be successful in their first 90 days and how would they measure that. To which the hiring manager answered the expectation was to get onboarded and the onboarding will take a longer time and ended up not answering my question. I also asked what the next steps would be. His answer was If I moved to the next round there would be a technical exercise with 2 engineers and if that was a success , then there would be 6 different interviews with members of the team. I did not say anything at the time. But this is way too many interviews. I think companies need to stop looking for a unicorn, act with agency to hire talent and not waste candidate's time. About a week after the interview I got a phone call from the recruiter , which is very appreciable. They said they decided to pursue with another candidate. I asked if they were willing to share more, They were graceful enough to share some useful feedback. I appreciate that as well. Ultimately the hiring manager did not from my perspective run a proper interview, asks questions relevant to the role or shown much interest in having an actual discussion on the role.

When you have less tenured folks interviewing senior ones, it's almost always bound to fail and also reflects poorly on the company. Asking a very generic question and being unable to drive the conversation towards specifics shows how badly the interviewers are prepared and frankly makes the whole session useless. Only positive was the recruiter who seemed more knowledgeable & prompt than the person handling technical interview which is quite a red flag. Wasn't surprised tbh as other reviews are similar.