My hiring experience at American Express was one of the most unprofessional I’ve encountered to date.
In early April, I received an unexpected phone call after 8 p.m. local time from a recruiter at American Express. The conversation was rather chaotic. The recruiter couldn’t explain what the role was, didn’t have information about the salary range, and tried to schedule an interview with the hiring manager for the very next day. She claimed she didn’t have my email address because her computer was broken, and said she would email me after the call to set up the interview — which she never did. I had to call her the next day to follow up, and only then was the interview finally scheduled.
After the interview with the hiring manager, she called me again in the evening. I couldn’t answer the phone, and without checking my availability, she simply sent me a calendar invite for the next round of interviews. I couldn’t attend due to work commitments. I followed up with her twice and received no response. The interview was finally rescheduled only after I contacted the hiring manager.
The recruiter would disappear for weeks at a time, then reappear, repeatedly pressuring me to attend interviews on very short notice — often the same or next day — without any consideration for my schedule or time.
My final interview was on May 5th, during a bank holiday weekend in the UK. I agreed to take the interview early in the morning to accommodate the hiring team, as the interviewer was based in Australia. It was the last round, and after that, I heard nothing further from the recruiter, despite of following up twice.
I eventually sent a message to her manager on LinkedIn, and within 10 minutes, the recruiter called me. She said the team had decided to go with an internal candidate. Instead of apologizing, she argued with me, blamed the hiring team and her colleagues for the poor recruitment process, and refused to take any responsibility herself. She promised to get feedback from the hiring manager, but never contacted me again, and I never received any feedback.
The recruiter was unprofessional, dishonest, and disorganized. While I had a positive experience with the hiring team and enjoyed the interviews themselves, the way the recruitment process was handled was completely unacceptable.