This company is a literal manifesto on how NOT to do recruitment.
Involved in a senior executive recruitment process which I decided to step out of at the 11th hour to preserve my time and sanity (I am still in a fulltime role and also in other hiring processes):
1. First discovery-meeting turning out not being a discovery at all but a rapid fire-syle behavioural panel-interview of 1 hour
2. A personality test is received at 9PM on a Friday with a Monday deadline
3. Second interview invite lands on Monday afternoon for next day lunchtime.
4. Third interview is imposed from 8PM to 9PM on a weekday
(Note: zero communication or feedback in between these steps)
Where I finally decided to step out and said "yes but no, thank you" is when the following happened:
5. F2F Meeting invite received with 1 working day notice requesting a 3 hr-presentation including extensive deliverables preparation and presentation of the following:
a) full quarterly operating plan (pipeline, forecast performance review, benchmarks, weekly calendar + weekly outputs x 13 weeks)
b) Deliverables pack with cross-functional operating stages, meeting agendas, decisions for first 60 days for the senior management
c) Plan for distributor and channel management in Year 1 (including scorecards, monthly review format, alert systems.
I asked for more time or some flexibility on their request and got a sharp no as an answer / all this while confirming that they are still unable to explain compensation structure or contract conditions until they make a final candidate decision.
This is when I told them I was not interested anymore.
At some point, this stops being just an messy, embarassing recruitment process and becomes shameless and unpaid consulting.
I suspect they were trying to get unpaid 1year worth of strategic planning done by senior candidates for free to then take the cheapest candidate and make him execute the readymade plans. I have heard it happened in unethical companies
A real waste of time. And looking at the opinions of the employees it is not a great place to work either.