For a company as large as Indeed, you would think they would have all their ducks in a row for interviewing. However, this was not the case. The screening process did a poor job making sure I was the right fit for the position since the recruiter rushed through the screening questions that would’ve helped her determine that I did not have the essential skills needed. Therefore, I was progressed on to the next stage of the interview process with the hiring manager. During that interview, the hiring manager admitted that she had looked through my résumé prior to approving me to move on to that stage of the process but quickly realized I did not have the high degree of technical skills needed. This raises questions as to why I was moved on to the next stage since it was quite evident that I lacked the technical skills they needed based on my résumé. In addition, I had been scheduled for three different upcoming interview stages without first making sure that I was the right candidate for the role. This was quite awkward as those interviews had to be canceled shortly afterwards. My background was heavy in training and instructional design, but not technical administration of learning platforms as the role required. So why did the hiring manager seem so eager to interview me and schedule me so far in advance?
One other issue was thar there were no indications in the emails that were provided prior to the interview with the hiring manager that I would need to have a Facebook account in order to conduct my video interview. This is very important information to have an advance as this required a lot more time on my end to log in since I rarely use Facebook and could not recall my account information.
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Indeed (Tokio) in Oct 2022
Interview
I had a very strange interview experience with Indeed. I finished my interviews with a sense of having done well, the only uncertainty whether I would be hired at senior/staff level. I was quite surprised to have been rejected flat out, despite feeling like a stronger engineer than most of my interviewers. For the coding interviews I thought I did quite well. I achieved an optimal solution on the first, and almost optimal on the second. I was surprised to find out one interviewer chose to describe my implementation as buggy and that I did not have a good understanding of the code. This was completely false, and either he misunderstood my solution or he was flat out dishonest. The architecture interview was equally disturbing, as I presented what I thought was a viable architecture, and the interviewer seemed perfectly happy with it. Yet the feedback was quite negative and equally dishonest in some parts. This seems like quite the pattern among interviewers at Indeed Tokyo, where the interviewers have no interest in seeing the candidate succeed and will encourage a suboptimal solution in order to sabotage the candidate. Either this company hires the brightest minds I've ever seen, or they have some agenda to not hire certain people despite merits. I strongly suspect the latter, as I objectively felt like I was a more competent engineer than my interviewers. Overall, very bizarre experience. Did not leave a positive impression on me in the least.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Had to sign an NDA, but 1 leetcode medium 1 leetcode easy
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Indeed in Sep 2022
Interview
Got contacted by Indeed recruiter to do a Karat phone interview. A week later after Karat, received an email inform that I will be moving to the onsite interview and asked for my availability. After sending over the availability, the recruiter completely ghosted me, Very unprofessional and a waster of time.