First of all, I understand recruiting in leaner organisations are a little all over the place. Yet, this was an absolute chaos. The process took about 5 weeks longer than what was told initially.
The process starts as usual, there is a screening call and then a video call was scheduled with the hiring manager and a team member. This was where I got asked about my cv and experience, a few technical questions and some questions to understand if there is a fit in terms of ways of working under pressure and ambiguity. The feedback was relatively quick from the Hiring manager as he told me to expect a face to face case study interview.
The case study interview is also as usual. You are given a hypothetical scenario and you need to come up with a slide deck within an hour and get challenged. This was a very enjoyable part.
From there, it was just silence for 3 and a half weeks even though you are told to expect the outcome in 2 weeks time. The outcome was positive for me and I was asked to meet the CEO for an introduction. The CEO meeting is a really easygoing, non-technical conversation - or so you would think. On top of that, an HR representative wanted to meet me the next day and what was supposed to be housekeeping questions (right to work etc.) turned into a technical ways of working interview. Regardless the HR gave a good feedback to my interview too.
Apparently, the CEO didn't think I was a good match by looking at my CV after our discussion. I am really not sure how that decision was taken since the meeting was a 5 minutes long, non-technical and non-work related conversation.
My suggestion would be to move the CEO review of CVs to the front of the process, if the decision can be made from just that so you can save time by utilising your team's energy on interviewing the CV's that gets past the CEO.
Overall, this was not up to the level of professionalism I see while interviewing other employers.
