The recruiter reached out to me to schedule an interview. I let him know my availability and the best number to reach me. No reply. I emailed him again to check in. He apologized for missing my message, and we set a time for an interview. I waited ten minutes for him to call me. With no call, I called him at the number in his signature block - no answer. I emailed him asking if it was still a good time. He said he was sorry but he was “in meetings” and asked to meet the following day. I could not meet because I had a medical procedure on that day, which I told him about but said I was available on Monday. No response. After four days, I reached back out to ask if he wanted to chat and to let me know if the position is unavailable. No response! Was totally ghosted. Wish I could call his manager. I thought a recruiter’s job was to recruit!

I applied in October and finally got an email from HR at the end of November. According to a friend who works here, the hiring process is extremely slow. I had one HR call and then did a first round of interviews on Zoom with two team members. The recruiter never mentioned anything about my location being an issue as it was advertised in my local area and my city was on the job listing. In my first round of interviews, the team members informed me of the actual location of the job which was in a completely different region of the country than what I was told from HR. I called them on it, said that I was not informed of needing to relocate and then asked when the location changed. They tried to downplay this and correct me that *actually* they were "under no obligation" to inform me of the job’s location until more of my time was wasted in the interview process. Following that, they asked me to list the other companies that I was interviewing with (red flag for me). I did not get invited back for second interviews probably because I was partially horrified and stunned at what had transpired in the hour I had meeting with them. It is a rare occasion for me when I enjoy HR and recruiters more than the actual team, but alas. ICE's HR was actually great to deal with in comparison to the people I'd actually be working for! Now some advice to the market regulation team members that did interviews—interviewing is two way. Most people unless they are absolutely desperate will run from interrogative, aggressive interviewers because it is probably the greatest red flag of a bad work environment. I’m rating this interview as difficult because of the random bombs they threw during the interview (if you're good at lying through your teeth then you might be okay). It was like they were trying to destabilize the candidates and make them uncomfortable; while this may be a common practice in some industries, I can't think of the benefits to work in an environment like that especially when there's other places with better work environments and better pay (including their competitors). If you find yourself in a similar position, then just leave the call, you don’t want to work for these people.