An external recruiter contacted me and referred me to an internal recruiter who scheduled a 30 minute call. She called me 10 minutes late and the call only lasted 10 minutes. She had a terrible phone connection and kept breaking up. After asking her to repeat herself several times, I told her that I was having a difficult time understanding her and said her phone was breaking up. She said "yeah, I don't know why my phone does that" and just continued along. I asked her about the company and she said it had been unprofitable and recently laid off 50% of the employees and was now trying to build a data science team to understand the product. Alarmed, I asked for more information and she said "huh, I'm new here, I don't really know. I should probably ask someone! Hahaha!" She never asked me any questions other than to explain a 3-month gap on my resume long ago (3 month bootcamp to brush up on my skills) and then said how impressed she was with my background and she wanted to set up a call with their director of data science immediately. She said she'd email shortly once she checked his schedule. 30 minutes later, she sent me a LinkedIn connection request, and then 5 minutes after that I got two identical, short emails saying "After careful consideration, we have decided not to proceed with your candidacy at this time." I forwarded it to the external recruiter who immediately called me and said it must be a mistake because he just talked to the internal recruiter who said she still had me in the hiring pipeline but he'd investigate further. 2 hours later he called back to say the hiring manager saw the gap in my resume and decided to reject me based solely on that. So many warning signs during the whole process, I had already decided not to proceed, but... Wtf?!? Such a strange experience!

I only talked to the recruiter. He was not welcoming at all and I felt very uncomfortable the way he talked. All the companies I interviewed for, the chat with the recruiter is a chance to share my background and for them to talk about the company and the position. It is NOT about the recruiter's achievement about how small his previous company was and how big it was when he left. It was NOT about being rude. Good luck on finding data scientists with this recruiter.