I've interviewed with Pontoon several times and each experience has been great... until the very end. Directors and VPs have openly told me that they loved our conversation and I definitely will be moving on to the next round of interviews, and then I experienced radio silence from Pontoon immediately thereafter. I never was proactively notified by anyone at Pontoon that I was no longer in consideration for any of the roles for which I had already completed 3-4 interviews. Instead, I waited several days to hear about next steps and only received an update from the recruiter because I was the one to reach out. In more than one instance, I was more or less told that they chose to go with an internal candidate (with the implication that the decision was due to political reasons).
It's extremely frustrating to have interviewers build up your expectations and then have the process come to a screeching halt without any updates. I know Pontoon is capable of providing a better candidate experience because everything is great until they decide to go another route. They've told me that they definitely want to keep me in the pipeline for future opportunities, but these poor experiences have raised a red flag about the company overall. If they don't treat high-potential candidates well when both parties are courting each other, how will they treat employees once they've committed themselves to the company?