Channable’s interview process feels long and drawn-out — multiple interviews, take-home tasks, and references. They seem to be looking for someone who’s not just skilled, but who will wake up every morning with the purpose of solving world peace. If you’re not their “unicorn,” expect to jump through a lot of hoops. Got reject since my answers were brief and didn't study their product, it's a plugin right? Basically be ready to give Ted-talk style answers and say you love their product and you want to solve world peace.

In the third interview round I learned that the role included database-administrator-like responsibilities, which was an expectation I felt could have been communicated a bit more clearly in the role description online, which mentioned use of databases tho not necessarily the extent of their prominence in this particular role. During this job application I further ended up feeling not taken seriously, as I learned that during my prior job application (half a year earlier) my Haskell experience for my thesis project was held against me as no doubt being on a level not on par with compensated (professional) experience, which to me came off as a prejudice not based on inspection of the (open-source) code. This felt weirder still as at the time I had explicitly attempted to challenge such a prejudice, making me now feel like I was not being listened to, while I got no further questions on this at the time when I challenged this. Another such occasion where I felt not taken seriously was around the start of the second interview, where the recruiter brought up my application for the role whereas I had previously applied for a different role. What surprised me about this was that they had asked me about this during the first interview round, where my response seemingly had not satisfied them enough to dispel doubts on that front during the second round, making me wonder why they had not asked me to further elaborate on this during the first interview already. The second interview round seemed to focus solely on collecting random anecdotes, making it feel only marginally more interactive than a web form (perhaps that might have sufficed?), rather than exploring role fit together. At the end of the second interview the technical interviewer also ended the interview on a particularly awkward note, when I asked if they had any particular doubts about me they would like to share I could perhaps further clarify on stating they did not intend to share any until after the interview. Together with the former point, this point gave the interview a weird adversarial vibe, making me feel utterly surprised when I was invited for a third interview round. This made the third round feel awkward from before it had even started, making me wonder why I would be treated in such a way if I had not been eliminated already - or conversely, why we would continue to waste one another's time with a third interview round if Channable had really already eliminated me. After the third interview round, I ended up receiving a rejection accompanied with the feedback to consider applying the STAR method to structure my responses to more tangibly communicate past results. In practice, I had read between the lines after the second interview already figuring this to be the stumbling block that might have turned the (technical) interviewer pessimistic. From my end however, this reluctance to gloat (instead opting to down-play personal achievements) stems from a humility related to self-confidence as a transfemme-identifying person. I believe I am by far not the only person from such a marginalized group less eager to speak about myself in such a way. I wish a job application might be able to cut past this, particularly while compliments on attentiveness at the technical assignment might have given away that confidence played a role in my answers. As such, whereas I do not doubt that Channable has followed common recruiting practices in this regard, I would wonder to what extent the recruitment process has taken in mind dealing with marginalized communities, rather than settling for performance at interviews as a proxy.