I was contacted by a Facebook (now Meta) technical sourcer who said my machine learning profile stood out for their London office.
After I clarified that I live in the EU not in the UK and can't move to London, she passed my case on to an incredibly unprofessional technical sourcer called Bilal Ahmad who was recruiting for Facebook Reality Labs in Zurich.
That's where the experience turned into a nightmare all of a sudden. The funny thing is that this Bilal was very much interested in my mixed reality development background (which was more relevant in this case than my ML skills). He wanted to have me interviewed so much that he even contacted me back to share some development on my case after our 1st call. Yet I refused the interview because he was so disrespectful that I didn't want to waste more time on him. Here's the thing:
Out of two calls that I'd have had with him, he was late for both, he actually forgot about them in both cases. First time he called me after I reminded him. But the 2nd time was crazy. He didn't show up for the call and didn't even reply my follow up emails or explain why he couldn't make it until 3 hours after the time we agreed on.
When I finally reached out to the original technical sourcer after more than an hour of waiting and asked her to remind Bilal that we had a meeting long overdue and my emails are unanswered, she let him know and then finally Bilal answered me 3 hours later. But even that answer was written in an unbelievably cocky and offensive tone. He told me it was not a big deal that he missed the call and I had to wait so long and instead of being apologetic he tried (in a very unprofessional way) to put the blame on me, stating that I didn't answer when he finally called me 2 hours later (indeed, I was already on another meeting, as if I was supposed to wait for his call all day long). He ended the email with a few more discouraging, emotional sentences, clearly reflecting his frustration that I reached out to the other resourcer which exposed his negligence.
At that stage, he asked if I want to go on with the process. I said no thanks. I didn't see how this person would co-operate any further with such an angry attitude and most of all, I was feeling offended and disrespected rather than appreciated which is not the sort of environment where I'd like to be interviewed let alone work.
I don't know if this is how everything goes at Meta or it is just one unprofessional bad recruiter who is good at hiding how he's chasing away talent rather than attracting it, but I've just checked and this guy still works in the same role, half a year later. So I guess Facebook thinks it's ok to treat candidates like this.
In which case, I'm happy I refused to proceed with the interview and looked for a less toxic company culture.
