The process was confusing and the stages/interviews changed several times, requiring several calls at the weekend to reorganise last-minute changes to their process. Initially it was 3 stages, but by the end, 7, spanning over two months.
1. 1 hour screening chat with internal recruiter
2. Take-home case study, taking around 8 hours
3. 1.5 hour review of the case study
4. 1 hour cross-functional interview
5. 1 hour peer review with tech team
6. 1 hour with hiring manager (head of tech)
7. 1 hour with CTO
So total active interviewing time with Affinidi for this role was ~15.5 hours.
There was a lot of repetition at each stage - answering the same questions based on my CV/experience.
Interviewers mostly seemed disinterested - struggling to drive the interview, often lacking good questions to derive the answers/discussions they needed, and conversely asking answers to questions asked about their roles/workload/vision.
The whole process felt very subjective, being passed from one stage to another based on one person's review (other than cross functional stage, no interviews had a second interviewer or even a shadower, which you'd expect at this senior hiring stage).
The case study was confusing, as it appeared to be a task. typically performed by a product manager or owner - produce a product requirements doc for a tech project. The project was of course domain/company relevant. The task was suggested at 2 hours, but to produce a quality document in that time, to progress, would not be possible; I spent 8-10 hours on this.
During the whole process, I never really got a solid feel for what exactly Affinidi produce and work on: what is their core product and revenue stream? CTO told me that they haven't yet found their product market fit, and seemed quite happy with that statement. They appear to straddle the gap between web2/web3, but again, it wasn't really clear, even after asking detailed questions throughout the 6 interviews (so 6 hours of video chat).
Hiring manager (head of tech) seemed to not have a lot of experience with interviewing - I asked them how many were in the wider tech team / would be in my team and was told, verbatim, "That's a company secret" "I can't tell you that as you haven't signed an NDA". Silicon Valley script writing, that.
Final chat with CTO was disappointing. It didn't feel like a 2-way interview, instead more like an interrogation. Given the process is a "pass one stage at a time then progress to the next", it is apparent that I passed all stages, but did not pass the final one with the CTO. This raises major concerns, in that the CTO was not comfortable to trust their team's process and individual & collaborative decision, instead overriding it based on their esoteric thought process questions. The interaction with the CTO definitely made me doubt if I'd accept an offer.
I feel like the Affinidi hiring process is outdated; it's clear to me that they've modelled it on the outdated FAANG long and intricate hiring process which is designed to filter out all but the most homogenous developer - I feel their process goes against all diversity hiring policies in terms of building a truly diverse team in terms of thinking approach and interactions; I feel it is extremely skewed against the neuro diverse. I feel this was was evident in the cookie-cutter interactions with the 7 employees I encountered throughout the process. Note that they are not paying FAANG salaries, not even close.
Final decision took 2 weeks to arrive, and was essentially a one-liner that said my skills in X area were lacking - this area was not discussed at all during any of the process. I can therefore conclude that this was a convenient reason, and it boiled down to failing the final stage with the CTO as above. If so, that's 5.5 hours across 6 people's time overridden. This is a major problem in process, and I want to highlight the risk that any candidate entering this process may be taking on.
Overall, the interview process was negative, the employees seemed uninterested and inexperienced at interviewing, and the senior staff outdated in their leadership approach.
