The interviews were mostly great. The negative rating is only due to one but significant thing.
4 rounds of interviews:
- A 30-minute regular call with a recruiter.
- A 30-minute technical background call with an architect.
- An hour-long in-person system design interview with the architect and a senior frontend engineer.
- An hour-long in-person meeting with 2 executives - you can call it a behavioral, but it was not about answers to specific questions, rather a set of invitations to share thoughts on broad topics.
All conversations were pleasant and interesting.
The negative rating is because they claimed that people were important for the company, that even when someone got fired, they did their best to make the process fair, clear and as non-confrontational as possible. Yet after the 4 rounds of interviews for a very senior position (actually - two positions, they considered me for either) at the company and the rejection they didn't provide any feedback. And when I asked for feedback explicitly, I was given one not making much sense and not related to the position or the interviews - that I didn't have Canadian work experience and was not familiar with the Canadian market. Which they knew from my resume, there was no reason to conduct the interviews for that.
I understand that sometimes you consider options that are not perfect, so it is possible they interviewed me in case my technical and people skills were good enough to compensate for the lack of Canadian experience. But during the interviews it looked they were pleased with me. And nothing we talked about was somehow Canadian-specific. I also have several years of experience at FAANG, and worked in two different countries (and work cultures). Highly doubt there is something so uniquely Canadian that it could disqualify me. But even if it was the case - it was possible to be specific about that in the feedback.
I do not know what went wrong, but it felt the company wasn't honest, which was a big negative for me.