The communication for scheduling interviews were through email. Since I lived out of state, all of the interviews were phone interviews. The first interview was with a Junior Recruiter and she was kind, patient, and professional. She asked behavioral interview questions, such as "Give an example of how you set goals and achieve them." The second interview was with a Senior Recruiter and it was a more comprehensive version of the behavioral interview, similar to the first interview. The recruiters were very professional and made my interview experience enjoyable. However, my experience changed for the worst when I had the final interview with the team. For the final interview, I called into the conference call on time, but the team was stalling for about 7 minutes because one of the team members was not on the call and running late. One person mentioned that he had a lunch break after the interview that he was looking forward to.
After she joined the conference call, they asked me to introduce myself and talk about my educational experience. I was talking for about one minute, when the same person that mentioned the lunch break cut me off, stating that, "we do not have much time left, so we need to move on to the interview questions." I felt that I did great on some questions and bad on others, but I noticed that it didn't matter for the entire segment of questions. They were clearly uninterested in me as a candidate from the beginning of the interview and it showed.
One of the clearest signs that they already had another candidate in mind was that they never told me about what I would have been doing in the prospective position until I asked them. In an interview, it is expected that the interviewer discusses the details and expectations that coincides with the job before asking questions. I had to explain to them in the middle of the interview questions (that were specific to the position) that I could not answer some of these questions without knowing more about the position to which that I was interviewing.