I applied online in mid-April and was scheduled for a call with a recruiter for the following week. Standard initial screening call, nothing unusual to report there. Next I was scheduled to meet with the hiring manager for 45 minutes and that went well - we had a good rapport and ending up spending nearly an hour chatting.
After that I was scheduled to meet with their CTO, but it took several weeks to get a single 45 minute call on the calendar. It didn't entirely seem like they had their act together. The 45 minutes with the CTO was pretty open-ended, and he asked me about zero of the topics I was prepped by the hiring manager to discuss. He asked a couple of extremely generic questions - nothing stands out.
Two days after the CTO interview, I received a generic auto-rejection. I walked away with the impression (and another PM interview here indicates the same thing) that the company either didn't know entirely what they were looking for, or was looking for a "perfect" candidate that likely doesn't exist. Frankly it was a relief to be rejected, as they'd initially told me to expect do a long case study if I made it further into the process, and in my experience these are usually "gotcha" exercises where they're either looking to extract free work from the candidate, or give you a business problem they've already solved for and then only want to hear you arrive at the same solution they did.
Overall, a time consuming experience (one month from start to finish, and I didn't make it to the case study stage) that left a sour taste in my mouth. I don't think they actually know what they're looking for, and are trying to socialize the blame for potentially making a bad hire by making candidates perform endless rounds of interviews and exercises.
