Bad experience overall interviewing for a Design Lead/Manager role in Palo Alto, about 5 weeks of nothing. This was for a Lead/Manager Design role which had to be in Palo Alto. I thought the design team recruiter was very informative and knew the needs of the hiring managers. I did the usual recruiter call, the hiring manager video call (rescheduled once because of personal reasons which went against me), another video call, and then two on-site interviews. The recruiter kept leading me on and eventually after a few days told me that the hiring manager picked someone from the inside who was working remotely and not in Palo Alto which was completely different from what the hiring manager needed. Reasons she gave also that it may have to do with the rescheduled call and the delay that happened and some thing about the solar eclipse which I couldn’t understand.
Till this date, the recruiter had never asked about my comp expectations, I found that weird, so I was hoping it was never going to be a barrier, but it is typical to discuss that upfront especially here in the Bay Area. I had met with a lot of designers and PMs till date. Then came a call again saying another team was interested in me, did a video call with the hiring manager, super interested in getting me on site again which I was fine with since it was a different team. Recruiter called me to ask about my availability for this on-site, preparing me completely and saying that this was going to be the final frontier now and finally I had to ask her to discuss compensation and I told her my expectations and she said she was ok with it and it was close to what they were expecting too.
She never came back to me for the final on-site.