I was contacted by a recruiter who seemed to work with Bytedance HR. During my initial webex with the recruiter, I had informed that I had little experience with the disruptive tech that was the focus of the job as my background was more traditional. At that first meeting I was assured that this was not an issue as Bytedance was looking at transferrable skills. I passed a subsequent online test and had a webex with a very disinterested Bytedance employee and guess what, the entire interview focused on my experience of that disruptive technology. I had done research and tried out as much as I could in the week or so since the first interview, but was informed later that night that I would not progress further. If your criteria is A and the candidate has already told you in the first interview that that is not something they have, then why make the person jump through additional hoops? Either the communication between HR and the hiring department is very bad or Bytedance are fulfilling an internal or country quota aka they already had a candidate in mind (which can be the case for other companies but they are seldom this obvious about it). In either case, the whole experience left a bad taste in my mouth. The only major plus point was that everything was v quick including the rejection, so I was at least not left hanging for weeks.

There are three rounds of interviews, the first one is for the international department, the second one is for the business head, and the third one is for HR. The interviewer is professional and efficient, and very nice