The whole process took me about 3 months. Obviously, you cannot expect any longer.
I first applied online in Dec and quickly got a response 2 days after with an important update email. The email wrote about they are still considering my application and will be given another update in the new year. I genuinely thinking this is the good news and feel confident about it and patiently waiting. However, things start to get slow and I have not received another communication until February 5th. It is to set up initial Google Meet interview and the job is not the one I am applying for. I just hope that in the future if Shopify says something it would mean it and show a little respect.
About the job, let me explain myself. I originally applied for Support Advisor, and the interview is setup for Bilingual Customer Specialist. It is all fine with me until he starts to act like he did not do his job before meeting me. He first tried by messing up information on my resume and expecting me to correct him. Then he told me he is going to interrupt me because he has a busy schedule. To be honest, from here, I started to have doubts about his intuitive of this meeting. Did not come too friendly as I expected. I am not so sure of this opening approach as HR is showing examples to future employee how they are going to handle their customers, in Shopify case, merchants who are busy making money and have a sense of urgency to get things done. I understand he made that obvious mistake is to see how comfortable I am to be in a hard situation by standing on my ground and not budge. But I believe there are better ways of getting the same result. After all, the approach must be appropriate, doesn't it? Let me put into perspective for this, when I am on the job, a merchant technically is the person I am going to interview with, and we are communicating. To get into a challenging conversation like offer services that Shopify can help and, in the end, generate more sales for the company. I would mess up his data/information intentionally to get a response from him and open that subject. But a recruiter messes up my resume information and expecting me to get into a tough situation and challenge him that he made a huge mistake right from the beginning? I hope you see where I am going with this, although it is the same strategy, just 2 completely different outcome. One being the end goal is to help merchant and company make more money while the other being life on the line. It became 2 different scenarios, and you would not expect same results.
After that 30 minutes conversation, we went through a series of questions, like questions after questions. I can recall all of them as they were still fresh in my mind but none of them is giving me a reasonable time to finish as he would interrupt me for every single one. My last job was in airline industry serving a famous airline. Extremely fast paced environment as we flew 227 destinations pre pandemic and the requests and jobs are just plenty and full of varieties. I don’t believe he understands when he asked me about what my last job was and why you took that job I would finish the answer right away and tell him in 3 words, which is “I love it”, “it is great”. Obviously, I need to build that answer so he can put himself into my shoes when he hears my story. But yes, he did not, he cut me off and kept on going asking me questions. Its like “since I told you I’m going to cut you off, then I am going to cut you off and don’t care.” Again, I don’t believe he has done his due diligence by understanding why he asks those questions to candidates, it seems to me he has a list, and he went on.
You know, I cannot blame him. Because we are not from the same place nor country. We are embraced by different environment; it is almost impossible to scale and only assuming all humans are the same. But the sad reality is the opposite, so at least put me into an interview with a person who actually from here, it may not have to be the same city, but at least the same country.
I guess if you read till here, you have a feeling I did not get the job. In fact, I didn’t get to the technical interview stage. About this, I am also disappointed. We wrap it up by him telling me I will be expecting a 2 round technical interview, but in the end, I received his email saying my application is archived. So what the actual duck? I mean it just cant get any worse than this and I looked at this experience compare to my experience with other company, but Shopify, beyond me and never knew their HR is so full of surprises, the professionalism is like interviewing in a car dealership but in a Google meet settings.
Disclaimer, not all apples are the same so maybe I got a bad one but doesn’t mean others are the same. Maybe next time I can get lucky