I met with two managers at a career fair at my school. I talked with them for 10 minutes each, shared my interest around the problems I knew they were tackling as a company such as essentially changing all stores to function as warehouse hubs in LA to expedite the rate at which customers can access products and the variety of inventory availability, and asked for more information. They referred me to go through their HireVue interview process.
The HireVue process was a bit confusing since they first send you a code assessment through their system then after more videos, but overall fairly standard for automated hiring processes that are unfortunately dehumanizing that seem to be an unfortunate trend in larger corporate organizations. The code challenge was a Nordstrom-flavored leetcode style problem that wasn't necessarily communicated properly for my coding language (wanted answer in a method where as it's in a class for most other languages, requested to return a value but what it really wanted was it to be printed to the std.out), but ultimately I did well, solved the problem efficiently, and felt pretty good about my considerations I included in explaining my thinking.
The video interviews were basic, asked questions such as why Nordstrom and other STAR questions.
All of that was fine. Not my favorite, but given the large number of intern applicants, I understand it. I would have had a neutral experience up to then. What happened next lead to me having a negative experience since I was genuinely very excited about Nordstrom as a company, especially as a female working in a male-dominated industry. I thought their culture would be a good fit, and I genuinely care about fashion, even if the pandemic has turned me into a cozy fashionista vs. trendy.
My classmates had received rejections fairly quickly, but I heard back nothing. I followed up with the email I had for recruiters twice, and never heard back both times. Finally, months later, I received a response back saying they saw I completed the process, wanted to circle back and let me know they decided on other candidates, etc, the usual. My conclusion, due to the lack of communication, was someone dropped the ball. I could be wrong and it took them months to process all applicants, but after multiple ignored emails, I instead felt their dehumanizing video interview process without any investment in the process on their end matched being ignored when trying to understand what to expect.
I fortunately have other offers, but I was very disappointed based on what I believed Nordstrom's company culture to be vs. what I saw from how I was treated and ignored during the recruiting process. I had been originally hoping to return there and make a career with them, but I'm no longer interested in applying for future roles.