Average video-phone interview with technical questions. Good conversation, helping the applicant's thinking in the right direction. This took place in the 1st stage of the interview process. I appreciate not giving 5-6 hour long initial exam but tried to bridge the personal gap.

HR got back on the application a couple of days after applying so the response time was pretty decent. I had two rounds of Webex interviews in addition to usual HR conversations over the phone with two recruiters but on separate occasions. HR kept me informed during the process when there was news. While there was a bit of ambiguity when scheduling the interviews and the second one had to be rescheduled these were fairly manageable things. The first round of interviews was quite a positive one even though I failed to properly answer a few technical questions out of my expertise. They knew my background is in a different sub-domain of security and I thought I had expressed interest in diving into the web security domain. The lack of full competency in the web security domain did not seem a big issue... This is why I think I was shortlisted for the second-round interview a couple of days after the first round. In contrast to the first round, the second round felt like a negative experience. The interview started sharply on time but shortly after the start, I experienced a permanent connectivity issue that caused a delay in conversations and intermittent video issues during the entire duration of the call, which made it difficult to have a conversational style interview. While the interviewer provided plenty of useful information on the role and on his role, I did not see genuine interest in his questions because of the following. Multiple times the interviewer paused after I answered a question and seemed to think what to ask next while seemingly reading from the screen. Questions seemed random and there were no technical questions asked in the second round. When I made a statement or a question back to the interviewer after answering a question I got little or no response. Towards the end of the interview he kept telling me they are "narrowing down candidates" and "HR will get back to you" even though I did not ask anything like that, and the interview ended 10 minutes before the intended finish. This interview felt distant for some reason, possibly multiple things contributed to this experience, which I tried to figure out. So after a week, I sent a message to HR that the second round did not go well, and that I would be open to discuss what was the issue. I did not hear back from HR and concluded another position should be more suitable for me and so withdrew my application at Diligent a few days later.