I was cold-emailed by a recruiter for the job. I made it clear that I would only be willing to pursue the job if they were willing to employ me remotely, as relocation is currently not an option for me. I was told this would be fine. Had a short introductory call with the recruiter, where I confirmed again with him that they would be fine employing me 100% remotely. Did an assessment test for them, which was well-received. Had a second interview with them. This one was odd; they seemed to think we were at a different stage of the interview process, and weren't aware that I had already done an assessment test with them. They also did not know I was supposed to be a remote candidate. They decided to "skip a step" and go over my assessment test, and have me make modifications to it in real-time while they watched via screen sharing. I was told afterwards that I "crushed it", and that they wanted to fly me out for an on-site interview. Score! Another recruiter got in touch with me to schedule the on-site interview. We went over available times to set it up, and he said he'd get back to me. He also was unaware that I'd be a remote employee and was surprised when I confirmed that with him. He did get back to me about four hours later, however it was to say that after speaking with the team, they did not want to hire another remote employee. I had been putting off accepting an offer from a different company so I could go to the on-site interview they were talking about, and I ended up losing out on that opportunity because of that. So thanks to DoorDash leading me on, I lost out on both opportunities. If they had known in the first place they didn't want to hire remotely, I'd have a new job by now. All the other interviews went really well and they were really cool, which is why I didn't rate this a negative experience overall. That said, please make sure you know whether or not you're willing to hire remotely before you give people interviews and make them think there's a good opportunity for them.

The recruiter initially reached out with several screening questions and scheduled a 1-hour live Android coding interview. I completed all the functional requirements asked by the interviewer within the allotted time. However, the recruiting coordination felt disorganized. In the initial outreach email (sent January 29), the recruiter included a forwarded template message stating that interviews would be paused for the rest of December due to holidays and resume on January 5th. This appeared to be a copy-paste oversight and gave the impression that my application was not reviewed carefully. While the technical interviewer was professional and the problem was reasonable, the overall candidate experience felt inconsistent. I would recommend more attention to detail in recruiter communication to improve candidate experience.