Closers.io seems to be building a strong product and a strong brand as they advertise heavily on multiple forms of social media. With their rapid growth and success, they’re understandably trying to find unique and interesting ways to create an effective bottleneck in their interview process to ensure they bring on the best mutual fit for their organization. All of this I understand. However, what I whole heartedly disagree with is the group interview step in their hiring process. In this group interview, they make you interview for a specific role in the same interview as other candidates who are also competing for the same role. While I’m sure they believe it’s an effective way to filter out candidates, it objectively creates an uncomfortable, unprofessional, and overall negative candidate experience. As a recently laid off recruiter myself, I always prided myself on creating a positive candidate experience for interested candidates whether they got the job or not and always told myself I’d never make them do something I wouldn’t do myself in the hiring process. This group interview step is a poor way to evaluate candidates and if this step is any indication on Closer.io’s company culture, then I feel very satisfied with my decision to withdraw from their process. I wish them all the best and hope that in time they modify that step because every other step in their process was very reasonable.