I was contacted by a Recruiter on Linkedin about a position with their recently formed Shared Services team. The Recruiter was incredibly enthusiastic about my prospects and made sure to present how much of an excellent candidate she felt I was, claiming to have been "stalking" my Linkedin profile for several days. Kind words considering I had not even heard of HealthFirst as an organization, but I was incredibly intrigued by the prospect of working here (ie - financially, they boasted what appeared to be an incredible salary boost from my current role). I read the negative reviews on Glassdoor prior to my over the phone interview and gave them them the benefit of the doubt as much of the negative feedback left was from several years ago and was primarily directed at departments outside of HR - big mistake. The tales of unprofessionalism do not appear to be false. After being spun an incredible tale by a friendly recruiter in early May, I was scheduled to have a phone interview with the Director of the team I would conceivably be working for the following week- phone because he lived out of state. We were scheduled for a 30 minute discussion - that's exactly what we had, with him not so subtly ending the discussion around the 29 minute marker when I attempted to get my 2nd question in. In that time, we spoke about the weather, his affinity for hiring unconventional people for their roles (he boasted about hiring a ballerina for an HR team), the importance of kindness in the work place, as well as the broken tooth he had suffered. For no less than 80% of the call, he spoke. I was asked two questions that I may or may not have answered to his satisfaction (I will assume did not). I was afforded the opportunity to ask one, which resulted in an answer that took up 1/3 of the 30 minute look phone interview. At the end, I got a fumbled concept of "next steps", which included being advised that he would "probably" have a member of his team reach out to me the following week to conduct an additional phone interview to obtain their insights. He even advised me that interviews would be conducted as of the week of June 3rd and that he felt there was "a lot that I could bring to the table" for this position. Despite the sinking feeling of something being off about this whole situation, I thought better of it - the words didn't match the sentiment, but the words were present nonetheless. He genuinely seemed nice and it was refreshing to speak with someone that spoke from a standpoint of kindness in the work place. While I'd never been on a phone interview where the phone interviewer spoke more than I did, I tried to set that to the side. Maybe this was simply an opportunity to see whether or not he and I could connect, I thought. Maybe this wasn't intended as an interview intended to determine my candidacy - who would talk about their broken tooth in an environment intended to ascertain someone's candidacy? He was just trying to see the kind of person I was. Clearly the next person I spoke with would present the real test of candidacy. I would chalk this up as an odd experience and await the "real" conversation next week. Except a week went by and it never came. Nor did it come the week after. The lone email contact I had accessible? 2 weeks without a response or any follow-up. I'm not one for calling when it is evident that there is no interest, but I almost considered it just because of how "kind" everyone appeared to be. On June 7th, the end of the week I was advised that interviews would take place and on June 10th, after a month, I finally got an automated email thanking me for my interest and advising they went elsewhere. Awesome! Call it bitter, writing this out - I call it the illumination of wasted time. I wasted my time researching and discussing an opportunity that is clearly notorious for unprofessional behavior and foolishly got shocked when it happened to me. A lesson learned, to say the least, to keep 2.9 Glassdoor ratings in mind the next time I have a conversation with a prospective employer.