After the first interesting and well-conducted interview with CEO, I had a really good impression of the company, and it quickly became my top choice among all the recruitment processes I was involved in. I moved onto the technical test stage, which involved solving coding problems and answering follow-up questions during an online meeting. After that, I was invited to another test at the company's office, but.. the invitation was canceled two days later. It really surprised and frustrated me, especially since I'd already spent more than a dozen hours preparing. My experience and skills obviously hadn't changed over last days and were exactly what I presented from the start in my résumé. I also noticed a few small "orange flags" that didn't quite match the image I had. For example, at the start of the tech meeting, I was blamed for rescheduling the first session because I was supposedly tired, which was only partly true. The first round had been planned for a Friday evening, and we decided together to move it since it overlapped with another interview I already had scheduled, actually after the interviewer himself mentioned he also felt tired after the workweek. The test itself went quite ok, despite my initial nerves. The interviewer was supportive and understanding. Some questions were very general, though, open to interpretation, and I wasn't sure what level of abstraction was expected. I kept wondering what kind of answer the interviewer actually looking for. The rejection feedback surprised me. The company wrote: "Were looking for someone very fluent in French and English to avoid misunderstandings with the rest of the team, and also someone with more interest in our product and our team." Well, no one ever spoke to me in French during the recruitment process, and I honestly don't know where the idea came from that I wasn't interested in the product or the team, especially after a technical interview stage. I've worked for years with developers of many nationalities, including French, and never heard feedback like that. I suspect it might be the result of some trendy HR concept adopted by managers with limited experience, or just a personal bias or gut feeling later dressed up with "professional" reasoning. It's a shame because I genuinely felt I could bring a lot to that role. Back in 2012, as a freelancer, I even built a similar product for the Nestlé group, in terms of data visualisation idea, just based on a relational database, not a graph, old-school JS libs, and operating on much smaller dataset. Anyway, it's a private business and I respect their right to take whatever decisions they like. Would expect only more respect to the candidates as they're the ones not paid for their time spent in the process.