An HR recruiter at the company reached out via LinkedIn. She was responsive and friendly, initially. She stated that they were aggressively hiring with a 2 week process and immediate start. Scheduling a call with the HR recruiter and a Senior Data Scientist was quick and easy. Each call took 30-60 minutes for a total time investment of 1.5 hours + prep time. The call with the Senior Data Scientist turned out to be a technical interview rather than the "casual conversation" my recruiter suggested it to be. Luckily, the questions were on basic classical statistics like how many k-folds for CV, bias-variance tradeoff curve, discuss recent project, etc. After that, I had to follow-up multiple times via email with the recruiter about next steps after she said the technical interview went well. I was promised an update multiple times by EOD, on various days. Never happened. The recruiter emailed one morning asking to connect over phone and I responded via email within 30 minutes, but she never followed-up with a call (or email) that day or the next. After I followed up with a 5th email across 4 days, I get a near immediate email response stating the position was "put on hold" until the New Year but asking to stay connected. Waste of time that really only became an issue due to lack of communication and transparency. My guesses are 1) recruiter overstated my performance to me and they found someone else they preferred 2) recruiter overstated my performance to me and they wanted to continue interviewing other candidates 3) the position really was put on hold 4) unknown unknown Definitely emblematic of much larger issues at this organization.