Applied online in late April/early May 2024. ---5/23: Contacted by email to schedule interview with recruiter. Responded same day and confirmed date. ---5/28: Interview with recruiter. Informal conversation, discussed my experience to date, what interested me in the role, some more info on the position as far as pay, benefits, hybrid setup, etc. Advised I would interview with the hiring team, and a slot was open for the next day. ---5/29: Interview with hiring team (manager and director). Learned about organization's history and about the team's structure, day to day work and expected projects, and discussed how my background and skillset would align well with what they are looking for. Call lasted just shy of an hour but was relaxed and engaging. ---6/13: Contacted by email asking for references and for me to complete a longer application form. This is the last message/communication received by the recruiter. ---6/14: All reference contact info submitted to online portal, application completed and submitted. Email sent to recruiter to confirm both steps completed. I allowed more time to pass than I normally would, as we were moving into the summer when people take vacations. But after nearly 2 months and seeing no status updates on my applicant dashboard (showed under review as of the date I submitted my references) and that the position was still accepting applicants, I emailed the recruiter on 8/14 asking if she had any updates. No response. On 8/19, I receive an automated rejection email from a donotreply address, providing zero explanation or feedback. "After carefully reviewing all candidates, we selected an individual whose experience and skills is a closer match to our needs." I understand not being able to provide detailed feedback to applicants who didn't make it to or beyond the recruiter screening - the number of individualized responses would be overwhelming in many cases. But one would reasonably expect, having completed the full interview process and the reference check (none of whom were contacted), that they would receive at last 2-3 sentences providing some form of personalized communication. Instead, all they felt I was entitled to was a dismissive, automated template email rejection. I emailed the recruiter again minutes after receiving that, respectfully asking if the hiring team provided any feedback when they made the decision to end my candidacy. No response. I would have been left with a much better impression if I received some form of direct communication, even if rejected. But to go through the entire process, reach reference check stage and then be ghosted, only to receive a copied/pasted scripted response is quite unprofessional. Again, had I not made it to or past pre-screening, I would expect such a response. But when your candidate pool is narrowed down to the extent that you have a limited number of candidates going through reference checks, you can't honestly say providing a few personalized sentences to the remaining individuals is not feasible. This experience demonstrated that the level of respect here was certainly not mutual.