Applied online and by the very next day I received an email from a recruiter stating that the hiring manager wanted to meet and discuss the role and fit. Met with hiring manager who was very friendly and said they were super interested in me and needed my exact skillset. I was then moved directly to the final loop stage which involved 5 45 minute interviews with people on the team, the director of the organization, and people from adjacent teams who interact with the group. It was a long day of interviewing but the experience was very conversational, pleasant, and friendly. They made small talk, broke the ice a bit, and was one of the better interview experiences I've had, especially from a major tech company. There are 2 issues that unfortunately mar that experience for me. The first is that after that loop interview, it took 3 weeks to get a response back. I sent a couple of gentle messages to the recruiter who never responded at all and and after the 2nd message I just stopped altogether and assumed I probably wasn't going to get it. The second issue that left a bad taste in my mouth is that on the third week, the recruiter scheduled a call and told me that there was a contractor they already had doing the role and they decided to give the role to that person instead. Nobody had mentioned that to me in the interviews at all. That is a perfectly fine reason, of course, they're already internal, onboarding is reduced, they know the people, they can jump right in and get to work. Totally understandable. But then, why in the world would you post that job externally? Why take up about 7-8 hours of my time with meetings when you had an internal resource to begin with? I took a PTO day to do those all those interviews. So that is why I rate the experience neutral. I won't give it a negative, because the interviewers were very nice and welcoming, but I'm not going to give it a positive rating because they were very inconsiderate of my time and were incommunicado for 3 weeks after the loop interview. They should've just done a direct hire with their contractor or made the job posting internal only rather than drag external people in to waste their time. The role was a lower level program manager role and they certainly would have plenty of internal talent to fill the role.