The company does not value applicants' time, and I doubt they value their employee's time either, based on my experience. First I received an email from a corporate recruiter at 12:05AM EDT. I saw it the next morning and replied, only to get the person's vacation auto-response email. He quickly replied right away and asked if I wanted to do a screener phone interview (he was still on vacation). When I spoke to him I asked if it was expected to answer emails or work on vacation. He said no, but that "it was just a travel day". A travel day is still part of vacation, and this interview wasn't a pressing matter, it could have waited until Monday when he was back in the office, instead of Friday, when he was still on vacation. He was on vacation on the West Coast, so that 12:05AM email he sent me, he sent at 9:05PM his time. He was working well outside normal business hours...on routine work...on vacation.
After the initial screener, I was contacted via email and I had a 1/2 hour phone interview with a Technical Writer as another preliminary. Nothing unusual there. After that I was contacted by the hiring manager to perform a writing assessment that I had 24 hours to complete, and said would take about 2-4 hours to complete. It was more like 4-5, since I wanted to be thorough.
After the writing assessment, I was scheduled for a half day of panel interviews. There were no breaks scheduled, everything was back-to-back, but thankfully at least one of the team members was aware of this and asked before his panel started if I needed to use the bathroom or get water or anything. The team I spoke with was all amicable and candid. In total I spoke with 14 people that day, including the hiring manager, and the technical writer I spoke with on the phone before. It seemed a bit excessive. The whole hiring process was overkill. This was a mid-level individual contributor position, not an executive/leadership role.
I was then asked for references a few days later by the hiring manager, which I provided. The icing on the cake was I found out I didn't get the job via a phone call from the original corporate recruiter about a week later, at 10:15PM on a weekday. I let it go to voicemail, and also received an email telling me the same. I get it that there is a 3 hour time difference, but even if you forgot that I wasn't in your time zone, that's 7:15PM where you are, still after hours. I received a phone call, and an email in the middle of the night telling me I didn't get a job. I suppose it would be one thing if I got the job, and he felt like breaking the exciting news to me well outside normal business hours. But a rejection?
There is absolutely no reason that he couldn't have waited until morning to give me the bad news. The whole hiring process took over 10 hours of my time for it to end like that. It was quite frankly unprofessional, and insulting. The team itself seemed good, but the recruiter and corporate culture completely turned me off from the organization. I will not be applying for any other jobs there, and I will tell this story to anyone I know who considers working for this company.