A very professional and intelligent outside recruiter contacted me about a Product Management role. This alone made me take notice as 99% of recruiters are honestly dreadful. He was lovely and explained via phone how the PMs at CarGurus aren’t traditional PMs so they look for business leaders vs super technical people to work with their engineers. It sounded good so I let him pass me to the internal recruiter, who was also nice and normal via a phone screen. Because I was interviewing at another company later that week, they got me into the office quickly and I went in at 9:30am on a Monday...right after they IPO’d. This was just bad luck on my part, but I did get a stressed/distracted/burned out vibe from the people at their desks. I was also told “many people aren’t here that early at 9:30am on a Monday” so it seems like I also picked a bad time to interview, in the sense I was one of the first candidates. The first Director I met was wonderful - charming, normal, friendly, intelligent, well-spoken and engaging. I immediately wanted to work for him. The second Director I met was the exact opposite - he was joyless, condescending, had an EQ of 0 and was a pure quant guy. He led me through a case study (that the internal recruiter had NOT told me would happen) and while there is no way to “study” for this test, this threw me off my game a bit. Within 10 minutes I knew I was struggling and just couldn’t get whatever magical decimal point answers he wanted. There was the added awkward dynamic of him previously being at the company I was currently at (although we had never met), so I felt he was being extra hard on me. After that torture session, the recruiter came to get me and she said she never knows whether to tell people they are going to do a case. I advised her it would be best to inform candidates of this so they’re aware. She said she’d be in touch later that week. We talked later that week that basically they were still interviewing and no decisions were made. I expressed that Director #2 was “intense” and made me feel a bit uncomfortable. She then said she had gotten that feedback about him before (!) and they were trying to work with him to fix it. Red flag. We talked again a week later and she said Director #1 had went with someone else for his team, and Director #2 was still looking (aka for “the perfect candidate”, which I am sure to him involves holding a mirror up to his face). We agreed to keep talking as there was possibly a Director #3 who needed a PM might want to talk to me, but at that point I think we both mutually lost interest and I never heard back from her, but also didn’t re-pursue. So I guess I never officially got rejected, but I would never want to work for Director #2 and take the chance I’d be re-orged under him, because I would hate my life.