The recruiter reached out via email and laid it on thick stating it was the best decision he's ever made and was filling several positions. Yet, he never furnished the JD, salary range, or asked for my résumé. When I asked about the JD, he said it's on our site. Turns out only one position was listed. Clearly, a canned email he's been using for some time. It was pretty clear, there's internal politics and I'm sure they knew I was not going to comply with their absurd take home assignment given my experience of ranking systems, LLMs, pitching clients, and doing extensive audits. Companies that need to do this are devoid in a proper process. My question on what their biggest challenge was received a big empty word salad. It was a terrific non-answer. Nothing was said about what they are trying to achieve as a company. Recruiter was nice enough, smiled, but was constantly positioning himself instead of genuinely trying to understand my knowledge and what I bring. Overall, pleasant I suppose, but no substance. The questions were surface level. The perception is that they are behind in transitioning to AI search because it wasn't even mentioned. This company has been in the space for a while but I did not get the sense it's stable. They are probably using terms such as GEO which is snake oil BTW. It's repackaged nonsense. This company struck me more as a stepping stone not one at the forefront of search. Overall, it felt more like the recruiter fulfilling a quota. Therefore, I never bothered to send a thank you letter even though I thought it was a pleasant enough conversation.