I've recently applied to a swath of startups and Peloton was the most WTF interview experience I've had, probably ever.
I applied via a friend who forwarded my resume to HR. Peloton then reached out to me and asked me to apply via their careers page as well, which I promptly did. I was then contacted by a recruiter who asked for my availability; my week was wide open, so I let this person know that anytime is fine.
After not hearing anything for a couple of days, I contacted Peloton again, and, this time, I managed to set up a specific time for a phone call. The time came and passed, and no one called.
I had to contact them again and got some excuse about a calendar popup. Fine. After finally managing to talk with the recruiter a couple of days later, I was informed that I'd be getting a coding challenge - they were almost apologetic about this part of the process and blamed some team member for insisting on it. Okay, whatever.
A couple of days later, no coding challenge. I was contacted by someone random from the engineering team who let me know in blunt terms that they'd be "doing my phone screen". I replied to this person with my availability, and heard nothing for a couple of days.
Some time later, another random person contacted me and said that THEY would be the ones doing my phone screen (there was no mention of the previous person or any contact from the recruiter during this whole time). They offered me some time blocks for the phone screen, and I picked one.
A day later, the person contacted me again, and said that the time block they originally offered would not work, and I had to pick an alternate one. I settled on a different time, and we finally managed to have the phone screen, which was pretty standard fare. Just general systems knowledge questions, some networking, some linux, and so on. Nothing unexpected.
The original recruiter contacted me again a day or so later and let me know that I'll have to complete the coding challenge. This involved taking a dump of data in one storage format and writing a program to massage it into another. I was told that it would only take a couple of hours, but I think a more honest estimate would be 4-8 hours.
After submitting my answer to the challenge, I was asked by Peloton's recruiter to come out for an onsite interview. Once again, I had wide availability over the next couple of days, so I replied saying, pretty much anytime would work in those two days.
I heard nothing back.
Until, a couple of days later, the same recruiter called me from Peloton asking me where I am. I was a bit taken aback, because there was nothing on my calendar. Turns out, they scheduled me for an onsite interview, without so much as a calendar invite, let alone a confirmation e-mail. And now, for the unbelievable part: literally while I was on the phone with the person, the event magically appeared on my calendar! I figured this was a tactic to shift the blame for wasting several hours of people's time. What they didn't count on is that I'm a developer who knows a thing or two about the GCal API. Yes - I looked up the event - and the original create time was during the phone call, ten minutes after my interview was supposed to start.
At this point, I thanked them for their time and proceeded to accept another offer. I have never encountered such a stunning lack of professionalism and coordination on behalf of a company. Guys, the challenging part of an interview process is supposed to be the technical questioning, not relentlessly pursuing the recruiters in hopes of getting on the phone with someone.
I sincerely hope that this review compels Peloton to improve their candidate experience, because, otherwise, I can't imagine who would want to work for a company that ignores their candidates.