I was contacted by an internal Senior Talent recruiter after submitting my application. My interview process was unclear and tedious: 1st call with Talent, very appropriate, lasted 30 mins. 2nd call with the hiring manager, very appropriate, lasted 1h. Then I received an email from Talent letting me know I was being processed to the next phase and would need to talk to a group of people. I was asked for availability, which I provided. 3rd call was with Talent to give me more feedback on the process. 4th-8th calls with five different people who'd be my stakeholders or team members, mostly based on San Francisco timezone, so pretty late for me (based in UK). When I provided my availability, I genuinely thought it was going to be one or two group interviews, not five individual ones of 30 mins, asking me all the same. I thought I'd smash most apart from one with an extremely junior person who seemed to be on defense mode the whole interview. On some of the other interviews, I was asked for real cases and recommendations on how to go ahead with some initiatives, and I provided lots of ideas. I followed up on my interviews, thanked them all for their time and awaited news from Talent. A week of silence later, I approached them again just to be avoided. A few days later I had a missed call from Talent. I tried to return several times, unsuccessfully. Finally, I got a short email stating that "the team didn't feel I had the right experience for the role", which came as a big surprised. I tried to follow up to get feedback on what was that they felt I lacked experience on, or what to improve for next time, only to be ignored. I never heard more from anyone in the company. When you have such a long, tedious and unclear hiring process, the least you can do is give back some feedback and offer support to your candidates, so they end with a good impression and not feeling used and discarded.

I'll start off by saying that NO interview should take a candidate's time for hours on assignments and meetings with several (literally) people. The company and culture are great, but the real skin was exposed with a classic rejection letter sent by HR. Out of respect for the candidate's time, HR or the hiring manager could have, at the very least, provided some feedback via call or by email, but instead chose not too. From the moment I spoke to the hiring manager, she made it seem like she was genuinely interested in me and really wanted me to be part of her team. After speaking to several people, who all seemed to be personable and friendly to speak with, I had a follow-up with the hiring manager who even provided me a roadmap on how my first 6 months at the organization would be, the people I would work alongside, etc. Why would a company make a candidate literally feel as if they got the job when in reality they shoot off a classic rejection letter without any information whatsoever? HR didn't even contact me back with my question about getting more information on their decision, yet when they wanted to interview, they reached out to me 3 times! Talk about a massive slap in the face. Hiring manager's at Zynga seem to really entice potential candidates and make it seem like they got the role when in reality it's the opposite. Stop the mind games. HR/recruiters play the "friendly" game until they know that the company doesn't want you. Forget about getting any feedback from them. I was initially encouraged to work at this organization, but after the way they wasted my time and dragged me along this entire process, I'm extremely disappointed.