Short version: think twice before interviewing here. They are disorganized, and they will waste your time.
Full version:
CK was disorganized and slow in arranging an on-site interview, they had to reschedule a few times as people were on vacation and they weren't sure who should interview me. On the day of, they still had to substitute for someone who was out of the office.
On the night before flying out, I checked the interview reviews on here. I probably wouldn't have gone out there if I'd read the reviews on here earlier, but since it was already set up I went ahead. Unfortunately I had the same negative experiences as so many others here and ultimately I regret wasting my time.
CK put together a schedule of 6 different interviews, including lunch with the hiring manager. This ended up being the weirdest thing about the whole experience. This was described as a casual discussion over lunch. Sounds fine, right? As the schedule was tight, I expected we would be eating onsite rather than going out. The night before they asked me to choose my lunch from a menu online of salads and sandwiches.
When I showed up I got a bag of CK branded stuff including a made-in-China Moleskine knock-off notebook (I guess they were too cheap to spring for the real thing), a pen, breath mints (probably more for their comfort than yours), and tissues (in case you get emotional about how badly you want to work there, no doubt).
The interviews themselves were pretty much as expected, except for one interviewer asking aggressively about scaling issues that had nothing to do with the role or team I was interviewing for, and pushing me to speculate about how I would have handled scaling on a previous project where scaling was not an issue. This was kind of weird, but it's not that unusual for interviewers to have an agenda that has nothing to do with the job. I wish I had pushed back a bit though because these questions were totally irrelevant to the role.
The weirdest part of the day by far was the supposed "discussion over lunch". Rather than me and the hiring manager leaving the little interview room and getting lunch, this is what happened: an HR person showed up a minute before and said "here's your salad". Then the hiring manager showed up and re-introduced himself and sat down and started talking... I said "where's your lunch?" and he made some kind of noises like "don't worry about it". So at this point I realized that the "lunch" was actually me eating while my interviewer watched! Hello? This is exactly the opposite of a casual discussion over lunch! Honestly I should have just walked out at this point, but I was just taken aback and so I sat there eating my little Caesar salad from the plastic box, in the same room that all the interviews were in, and which smelled like Caesar salad for the rest of the afternoon.
It wasn't until later that I thought about how bizarre this was. Isn't sharing a meal with someone that you are going to potentially work with a pretty basic thing? What kind of confused company thinks that watching someone eat is the same thing as having a discussion over lunch? It really makes you wonder, if they get things like this wrong, what else are they getting wrong? It's a red flag for work-life balance and generally knowing how to treat people. It almost made me wonder if it was some kind of behavioral interviewing technique to see how you handle an awkward situation... "here's your salad". But I think it's just incompetence.
Finally, after all that, I had the same experience as so many others here: nothing from CK. Just nothing. Reached out a few days later to see if they had any feedback from the interviewers... and nothing. Just ghosted. Not even a generic "thanks for applying" email, just total radio silence from them. Shouldn't be a surprise to anyone reading here, but it's unprofessional. Anyway, if they treat applicants this way, how must they treat their employees?
I see that CK is replying to the negative reviews here with something like "we're sorry you had a bad experience". Save it, please. All it would have taken is a little thought and common politeness and professionalism to do better than this. The time for that is past. Save your efforts from damage control and fix your process.