This was not a great experience and I wanted to share this with everyone as a warning. In early December of 22, a Flexport recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn. I was already in the market looking so I thought why not. He scheduled the usual recruiter phone screen and it went by smoothly. The recruiter gave me a premature thumbs up and confidently said he would reach out by end of day to schedule the rest of the interview. Nothing happened and to be honest, I completely forgot about them. It was only in late January did a different person cold email me about scheduling a follow up. I had no idea who she was and she didn’t even use her Flexport email. I played along and said sure and before I gave her any dates, she called me an hour later. She was very abrupt and acted like she was doing me a favour. She redid the entire phone screen and when I mentioned I had already connected with someone, she said in a nonchalant manner “oh he’s not with us anymore and we can start again”. Fine. It went well I guess and she scheduled the technical phone screen for the next day (I requested it). The guy interviewing me was bizarre; he looked like he was on the verge of killing himself. He talked at a comically slow pace and gave me an OOD question. Actually, he just copy and pasted the prompt on the screen and just sat there. I didn’t see the prompt at first so we just sat there afk for 30 sec until I asked him if we were waiting for something. I solved the problem and that was that. I got weird vibes from Flexport already and I also had another offer at hand. I emailed the recruiter about my other offer and told her i was interested in continuing if we could expedite. Surprisingly, another recruiter replied and indicated that she’s now the POC. Awesome, another recruiter. She also cold calls me and goes through the bullshit introductions and all that. It felt like deja vu and i was really wondering whether I’m concocting this in a dream. She talked like she was a primary school teacher; she was very deliberate and asked me stuff like “do you know how much you want?” and “let’s both do our best to get through all this right?”. I tried to cut it short and we finally scheduled the final onsite for the day after. I started my onsite in the early week of February. It was divided into three sections: behavioural, design and coding. The behavioural was literally another hr phone screen except it was conducted by an overworked engineer. He was nice but he told me verbatim that this interview was him reading off a list of hr questions. It was an hour and very boring. We finished early and I asked him more about his time at Flexport. His answer was that he was an ex googler sick of working and he came to Flexport to cash out. He complained about not being able to cash out his Flexport equity in the private market. I didn’t know how to reply and was glad to finish this. The design round had a standard prompt. I went through the usual questions, clarifications and estimates. The strange part was that my interviewer never said a thing. She just sat there afk and seemed to be thinking about the tallest building she could jump off of. I had to get her attention first before repeating my question and she replied in a thick accent across a broken mic. I really tried asking questions and getting this interview to be a discussion but it was literally me talking to myself. I actually forgot she was there and I had to pause and check the camera to make sure she didn’t off herself yet. Finally, I reached the coding round. The man I was talking to didn’t really seem to be a man but more like some unreleased open AI project. It was very strange and when he introduced himself he said his passion was “solving flexports problems”. Very interesting. After 30 seconds of introduction, we went straight to the coding problem. Again it was very OOD oriented and I got through all 3 parts with tests running. The AI seemed to be malfunctioning because he again didn’t say a word and I could hear his heavy rhythmic breathing across the mic. I would occasionally do a pulse check and ask clarifying questions or sanity checks and he would give a full “mmhm” or “nuh uh”. I finished early and upon doing so he said verbatim “very nice”. And immediately turned off his camera. I was confused and asked if there was more and he grunted a bit, recited his preprogrammed goodbye and the call ended. Right on cue, the third recruiter called me and asked how the interview went etc. I told her my external offer deadline is approaching and said that I would like an update my Wednesday. It was a Friday then so giving them 3 days would be a rush but she quickly agreed and said no problem. The week passed and on eod Wednesday I sent a follow up email since Flexport decided to vanish off the face of the earth. I think Flexport recruiters are trained to cold call because she immediately called me and said that apparently the hiring committee was sick the whole week and only just begun reviewing. I said that’s ok and we again agreed that by Friday, she will have an update. That date was Friday 17 and I never heard from them again. To be honest, I’m a bit scared to talk to them again since flexporters have this unsettling aura that they carry with em. I moved on and took my other offer. I decided to write all of this today because I woke up suddenly remembering that Flexport never got back to me. The whole interview felt like an fever dream and I’m still unsure if it actually happened. I went back through my emails and verified that my 2nd and 3rd recruiters were in fact from Flexport, and that the company actually exists. I think the only lesson learned here is that flexport enjoys ghosting candidates. Oh well. #flexport
This is what Writing at Amazon does it you :-)
Not concise enough
Why go from Amazon to Flexport anyways?
My interview experience was the exact opposite. Recruiters are super prompt on email replies ( replies within an hr or 2) and schedule all meetings and no cold calling. All my interviewers seemed enthusiastic and got confirmation of passing the phone screen within an hour. Confirmed passing the onsite in a day ( interviewed on a Friday and got results on Monday).
Hi op can I dm?
Go ahead
How can someone look like they’re on the verge of killing themself lol? Was he holding a knife to his throat?
I just read the first few paras. Whats so bad about recruiter introductions in email, the POC part?
Does Flexport have a lot of international managers and employees? Could be a visa interview they have to get done for a high ranking Manager maybe?
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- Flexport interviewers are weird. - Their recruiters cold call candidates. - They ghost people. - Stay away coz weird vibe.