I'd like to preface this by saying to Martin, Owen, Lee and the other two guys from the dev team: I'm genuinely sorry this didn't work out, you were all absolutely sound and I definitely saw myself working alongside you all. First stage was a technical discussion with the company Architect going over my CV and asking some technical questions. Fairly standard questions really, nothing a half-decent developer couldn't answer. Second stage was a HR/Culture interview with the Head of IT and a Project Manager. This covered an overview of the company culture and behavioural questions. Third stage was a presentation to the dev team on a topic of my choice initially, but they changed this on 2 days notice so I had to create another presentation from scratch. I begrudgingly obliged because I was given the impression that this was merely a box ticking exercise to keep the MD happy. After comfortably passing every stage of the interview process with flying colours, I was told that they couldn't make me an offer yet because the MD insisted on them interviewing more people at the third stage. For context: I was the only candidate so far that had even made it past the second stage, and was by all accounts a perfect fit for the role. They essentially expected me to wait around and give them the opportunity to find someone better, which is absolutely not how recruiting developers works. The lack of respect and consideration for my time and effort, not to mention the recruiter's time and effort was the final straw and I withdrew from the process without hesitation. If they can't even hire the candidates they want without a clearly out of touch MD interfering, I could not see myself ever working at this company.