Applied in mid-May 2026 for an AI/LLM penetration testing contract via a recruitment agency. The technical bar was high and the practitioners I dealt with directly were sharp, but the process around it was poorly organised from start to finish. The technical assessment was a Hack The Box challenge with two machines. When I first logged in, the environment had been set up with no machines assigned to my account, so I could not begin. I raised it, but the hiring-side contact responsible for the setup was then out of office, so a basic provisioning issue held things up before the assessment had even started. Once it was fixed I completed the challenge within the deadline, fully compromising both machines including both domain controllers on the harder box, and submitted written reports directly to the hiring team. The follow-up was scheduled as a three-person panel from the cyber security team; only one attended. The conversation itself was a good, substantial technical discussion and ended positively, but the questions I had about the role and the project had to be deferred because the people who could answer them were not there. I was told there would likely be further stages with the missing panellists. Those never materialised. After that came over a month of near-silence. I chased repeatedly and eventually had to reach out to staff on the client side directly before getting any response. A hiring-side contact confirmed in late June that an update would come that week; it did not. No feedback was offered at the point of rejection - it came only after I stated in writing that a flat no with no reasoning wasn't acceptable given the investment involved, and even then it was a single vague sentence saying I hadn't shown the required level for the specific project. No technical detail, nothing actionable. That doesn't reconcile with a completed technical challenge, full reports delivered, and a positive interview - particularly when the panel meant to assess me was two-thirds absent. If you ask candidates to complete a multi-day technical challenge and submit deliverable-quality reports, the least you owe them is timely, specific feedback. A vague one-liner extracted only after a month of chasing does not respect the time invested.