Earlier this year, I had an interview with a fairly serious company which shall not be named. They'd sent a mass email on LinkedIn a couple of weeks earlier, so that was my contact with them. After a chat with their in-house recruiter, they asked me to do a couple of tests, one a simple server application, one an intermediate-complexity SQL query. I'm willing to say that my SQL is competent, but it's not a focus for me, so while I got the idea, my query didn't actually work. The recruiter told me that it would be a good idea to be ready to explain why, and how I would fix it, for the technical interview. I rustled up a couple of acquaintances with better SQL than I, we worked through it, I knew what I'd done wrong and was ready to discuss it.
Technical interview came, on Zoom, and it was a car crash. There were two interviewers, one was on time, one was late - the late one was also only on audio, and it turns out mixing one audio-only interviewer with one on video was a bad idea. They mostly asked me about my background and experience for about half an hour, then ended the interview - never asked about my tests, didn't go into anything technical at all.
I didn't hear anything back, so I pinged the recruiter a week later, only for him to tell me he wasn't working there anymore, but he'd pass on a message for me. I then pinged the one other person I'd had any actual contact with at the company, the HR/admin who'd setup the Zoom call, to be told "we will not go for further process as rejected by hiring team."
I was pretty unimpressed.
