Applied to a role after being referred by a current employee of the company and former colleague of mine. Process involved an initial screening with a recruiter, a technical screening with an engineer, and two more full length interviews on coding and systems design. Beyond that I believe there were two more interviews with hiring managers to be had, but I did not make it that far.
After my last two interviews I sent an email to the recruiter who I had been working with thanking the team for their time and reiterating my interest in the position, to which I received no reply. After 5 days of not hearing anything, I sent another follow up email to check in and again did not get a response. At this point I’m just wanting to hear any news, good or otherwise and decide to re-comb through my inbox by hand. Sure enough, there was an email in my junk box that I had missed because it came from a third-party domain. It appeared to be an automated message, which stated that they were not moving forward with my application.
Disappointed but wanting to keep the door open, I sent one last email thanking them again, asking for feedback, and letting them know I would love to still be considered for other roles future. Again, no response.
While I certainly don’t expect a response after every job application, I do think it’s reasonable to expect one after investing hours of my personal time into preparing for and performing several rounds of interviews, I found the impersonal, automated, rejection notice and ghosting by the recruiter highly unprofessional and disrespectful of my time as a candidate. I’d have serious doubts about interviewing here again after my experience.
