I have done a fair bit of interviews throughout my career, and this has been by far the worst experience I've ever had. Time-consuming, poorly managed and frankly, disrespectful to me as a candidate. At the time of the application, I was contracting for a bp-owned software startup, having been working in the Oil and Gas sector as a senior user researcher for the past three years. I applied by reaching out to a colleague at bp (we share the same offices as their research and design team) and was put in touch with a recruiter. The recruiter was extremely unresponsive, needed constant chasing, and even when one of the hiring managers had asked them to schedule an introductory call with me, they failed to do so. It took about a month of chasing to finally get any interviews organised. There were three sets of interviews: Case Study, Scenario and Values / Culture Fit. The first two were fairly generic and comparable to similar technical skills interviews at other companies. Values / Culture fit interview had some very personal questions about vulnerabilities that made me feel somewhat uncomfortable, as I felt pressured to share traumatic experiences to prove that I would 'fit' in and felt comfortable opening up about personal stuff. That didn't feel right at all. Some of the people were friendly enough, but others came across as somewhat hostile and arrogant. They all very much took it for granted that bp was the one and only place I wanted to work at, even though I was transparent about the fact that I was being interviewed elsewhere. A week later I was informed that I had gotten 'mixed feedback' and was therefore bumped down from being considered for a 'Lead' role to a 'Senior' role. For context, the lead role I was interviewing for was £110-120K base salary. The senior role was £75K, so significantly lower. I have had £95K offers from Facebook / Meta and other companies in the past two years, and having had a lot of experience in Oil and Gas, I didn't feel £75K was at all appropriate. The worst part was having to have yet another Culture Fit interview (having already completed one) with the person who would be my manager. She was 20 minutes late to a 30 minutes meeting, and started by saying 'I'd been asked whether you would be a good fit for my team, and frankly I'm not sure'. I was pretty tempted at that point to tell her that I was pretty sure she was the last person in the worst I'd want to work for. It's completely understandable to be unsure about candidates and whether they're right for your team, regardless their technical expertise. It is also completely unacceptable to tell them that to their face, and when 20 minutes late to a meeting. A week later, the recruiter finally called with the £75K offer, and without even asking if I was interested, proceeded to talking me through what next steps were re paperwork, contract etc. I had a really good offer from another company at that point, for a Lead role, but even if I didn't have that, I would never have accepted an offer from a place that made zero effort to convince me that they were actually a good and friendly place to work. Arrogant, self-entitled, rude.
