The hiring manager reached out to me. He said he really liked my experience and believes I am a good fit. The next day the recruiter reached out and said the hiring manager has decided to down-level me to a Sr. Manager role. And that there's 2 more interviews, Supporting Teams interview and a Technical Deep Dive interview before the panel interview. What really made the process a negative experience for me was the lack of transparency from both re recruiter and the interviewers.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. standard cross functional questions 2. pick a system you/your team built/designed and walk me through the decisions made, challenges, considerations..
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Figma (San Francisco, CA) in Jan 2026
Interview
I had one 30 minute conversation with a recruiter, and a 45 minute conversation with hiring manager.
The recruiting call was great - cordial, frank, we went through my background and they answered any questions that I had.
I was scheduled for a meeting with the VP nearly 2 weeks out. On that call, they showed up nearly 10 minutes late with little in the way of an apology.
I don't believe they have any sort of structured interviewing process as the questions they asked were exceptionally broad and covered multiple sweeping topic areas and were clearly not thought out in advance. The first was "tell me your story of what you've recently worked on, the level of organizational and technical complexity, how big of an org you were in, how much did you grow it, and what specific experience you have in [role specialty]" as a single question followed with what was basically "I'll interrupt you with followups".
There were two specifics in the interview that struck me as very odd - the hiring manager asked why I left a job nearly a decade ago after misquoting from my resume how long I'd been there and then at the end left 2 minutes for my questions of them, and when I asked if we could go a little long since they were late said "sure" but answered my next question curtly, said goodbye, and hung up without giving me a word in edgewise.
Was unsurprisingly rejected by a form email 2 days later, which is totally fine given the number of red flags.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What was my "story of what I've recently worked on, what level of complexity, how big of an org and how much did I grow it"