My candidate experience was extremely disorganized and it was difficult for me to get basic information about the role and process from the Talent Acquisition team. I asked specifically about the pay range and basic interview process (how many rounds, who will I meet with, and any focus area of the interviews) and was not able to get a clear answer. I assumed that the lack of transparency here just a cultural difference between Bay Area and Chinese tech companies. These are questions literally 100% of other US based tech companies in SF Bay Area have been able to provide for me up front during my current job seeking process. I had two interviews, one with a team member and a hiring manager. The team member interview was ok, despite him being 20 minutes late for our 6PM interview. He started with an intro and asked a bunch of basic behavioral questions about team dynamics. The hiring manager was painful to say the least. She was on time but started the interview by stating her name and jumping straight into a question, no intros or opportunity for me to share a general overview of my experience. Her questions were all over the place, it was clear she was reading off a list vs actually having a thoughtful conversation about how my experience would be transferrable to the role. She jumped from general questions about my experience to completely unrelated questions. To be honest, context switching was difficult for me because there was no logical flow. In the end, I didn't have the best opportunity to elaborate on my experience but she also didn't seem to understand me anyways. She kept asking me to repeat what I said until I stripped down my responses to a few words, hoping she'd ask me to elaborate but she didn't. I'm not confident that she actually understood what I said. At the very end, she revealed that she was the hiring manager. The product seems exciting and the industry is facing challenges I'd love to help solve, but I'm glad I had this experience to discover that this is not the team / company I'd be happy working for.

I had an initial interview back in January for a SoundOn role. They wanted to reschedule half an hour before the call, I said I would prefer to keep it to the same time. The interviewer was very passive aggressive and clearly frustrated that I couldn’t reschedule, asked for a brief summary of my experience and implied within the first few minutes of the interview that I was not what she was looking for. She decided to ask me interview questions "as a formality." She was uninterested in my answers and went through them like a laundry list. She allowed me to ask questions at the end, I asked one and she told me that it was a "bad" question and that I did not appear to know what role or company I was applying for. I have never had an interview where the hiring manager was so disrespectful and belittling. She finished the interview with full confirmation I will not be moving forward and that there must have been a miscommunication as to how I reached the interview stage at all. She ended the interview, stating we "wasted each other's time." The interview has repelled me from applying to this company (especially for SoundOn) again. Reached out to HR afterwards to report the interview and was ignored.