This was a second stage interview for Admiral Pioneer. Prior to this interview I had already had a fairly intensive technical interview with two of their devs asking me tech questions and problem solvers for an hour. this first interview was thorough and went very well. The interview was conducted by the CTO from the back of a taxi which I felt was quite unprofessional. Aside from this, the interview itself was actually okay despite me finding it extremely difficult to hear what was being said over the background noise. This, along with a bunch of other issues with my hiring process has left me extremely disappointed at Admirals overall professionalism. Ive tried to reach out to their HR dept to address this on multiple occasions, which made some slight progress with one woman who was quite helpful in passing me to someone else but ultimately has lead to me being ignored. I actually got offered the role with Admiral at the top end of my expectations. Which i accepted. I was then told to get everything in order ready for my start date, (which i was very excited about). A few days prior to my start date this was retracted because of some sort of recruitment/funding restructure meeting from the CFO (this is what i was told). As you can imagine this was extremely frustrating to me because: - I rejected another offer elsewhere, - I cancelled another interview for the following day, which i then had to re-organise making me look quite silly as the other company knew I had chosen them as second best. - upon request from Admiral/the recruiters, I setup a LTD company for IT contracting which I have no use for - including corporation tax and VAT. this leaves me with a lot of liabilities which could have been avoided. - I paid for the various insurances required for the role (prof indeminity, public liability etc) which i have no use for and now have to cancel. - I paid for an IR35 assessment which was no longer needed. - I spent the best part of a week brushing up on graphQL and PostgresSql specifically for the role so i could hit the ground running. whilst no one asked me to do this, i did it because i was both excited and eager to make a good first impression in the role. Overall, the whole interview process wasted 2/3 weeks of my time and a substantial amount of money and effort. I was successful throughout the process only to get dropped at the last minute for something totally outside of my control. I feel that Admiral has acted very unprofessional throughout the process, especially the approval of my application only to be retracted a few days before starting. I feel this could have been totally avoided and i would have been much happier with just being told the truth that Admiral was going through a major recruitment/funding restructuring and that I may not get the role because of that, rather than getting told I've got the role and to set up all my insurances and company. I actually did not want to post about this publicly, preferring the option to remediate with Admiral HR and more than anything, just give them my feedback at how disapointed I was at the treatment of a (almost) new employee. But having tried to reach out now on multiple occasions and failing, I feel like this is my only option so no one else falls foul to the issues that I have encountered with Admiral. I can safely say I've never been through such as shocking and unprofessional hiring experience as this.