Retool Talent Acquisition (TA) reached out a month after I’d applied. TA seemed really keen on my candidacy and booked me in for a 30-minute interview the next day with someone from the team (HM).
The HM advanced me to the next round, known as the technical evaluation. This required me to complete a take-home exercise using the Retool platform, with a checklist of deliverables. I then had to present my work to someone from engineering (SE), who would act as a customer, in a 30-minute interview.
I prepared extensively for both the interview and the demo. However, the interviewer appeared preoccupied from the moment she joined the call. Interviewer seemed extremely unprepared, dull, and completely indifferent to my presentation. In hindsight, they may have been having a bad day, but this is precisely why it’s important to include a second interviewer to prevent bias and ensure fairness. They asked perhaps one question and left exactly *two* minutes at the end of the interview for me to ask questions. I managed to fit in one question, but their answer was rushed as they said they needed to join another call. Very unprofessional.
A few days later, TA contacted me (she’d been out of the office) to say that Retool’s recruitment software was down, so they would need to wait until they were back in the office to provide feedback. They assured me that they did not want to lose me as a candidate.
However, nearly two weeks after the technical round, I received a generic and robotic (presumably auto-generated) rejection email from TA. It contained the classic line: “We’ve truly enjoyed our conversations and learning more about your experiences. At this time in the process, we needed to make the difficult decision to review the current pipeline and, after much consideration, made the hard decision to move forward with other candidates.”
When I emailed back to request feedback on my application and interview performance, I received no response from TA or anyone else at Retool.
Overall, I enjoyed building a rapport with both the HM and TA, but unfortunately, this did not translate into a professional experience. The company seems to treat candidates well initially but then dismisses them casually. Very disappointing. I would not recommend interviewing with Retool unless you want to waste your time and energy.