When the Interview Barely Happened: My Intellias Interview

I applied to Intellias for a Security Engineer role through LinkedIn. What I got was not a hard rejection after a fair process. It was something worse: a process that never really happened, followed by a machine-generated goodbye that pretended it had - and then, after a second chance that actually went well, a final no because I forgot to tick one box on a skills form.

This is what that looked like.

Disclaimer

This is not an attack on Intellias. I am not trying to damage anyone's reputation, name individuals, or start a fight.

I am writing this because the process failed, nobody on their side seemed willing to hear that, and I want the company to know how it looked from the candidate's side. No personal details about the people involved. Just my account of what happened, and why it felt unfair.

In fact, I'll probably do it for other bad interviews :)

The invite that never arrived

They contacted me for a first call. We confirmed a time. And then... nothing. No calendar invite. No link. No follow-up. The next day I had to remind the recruiter that I was still waiting. Small thing, easy to dismiss, so I won't be hard on this one.

The intro call itself was fine. Normal questions, normal tone. We agreed there would be a technical interview next.

Scheduling as a loyalty test

The day after that, they booked the technical interview at a time I could not do for personal reasons. I asked, politely, to move it.

The reaction was not "sure, let's find another slot." It was closer to: why are you unavailable if you said you wanted to move fast?

I clarified the obvious. Being able to start soon is not the same as being free every hour of every day. I had some technicians coming to my house at an unknown time on Monday. If we are going to have a half-and-hour technical interview I'd prefer to be relaxed and not worried about the guy that is destroying my walls with a hammer (duh).

So we moved it to Wednesday. The exchange left a bad taste - as if accommodating a candidate was a favor they were granting, not part of running a hiring process.

Fifteen minutes of a ninety-minute interview

I usually join a few minutes early, just to check that the camera and mic are working. When I connected, the interviewer was already there: serious, no real introduction, straight into "tell me about your previous role."

Fair enough. I started explaining.

Then his connection fell apart.

Not once. Constantly. Questions cut mid-sentence. Audio so broken I had to say, more than once, that I had not heard him. He pushed for specific security jargon. I answered from experience as best I could through the static. The role, as I understood it, was largely about playing with policy-as-code on AWS - useful work, not exactly a career epiphany.

The slot was booked for an hour and a half. At about fifteen minutes, it was over.

I think I heard something about liking my CV and that they would get back to me. I am not sure. That is how bad the connection was.

I hung up and sat there thinking: I prepared for this. I researched the company. I showed up ready. And I had barely been allowed to demonstrate anything.

The AI rejection before the follow-up

I contacted the recruiter to talk about how the interview had gone. We scheduled a call for 4pm.

Some hours later I opened LinkedIn and found the rejection waiting for me.

Not a short "we've decided to move forward with other candidates." A long, polished paragraph that smelled like AI: feedback about topics we had not discussed, generic "suggestions" to improve my experience, and a farewell that read like someone had been told to close the ticket.

It felt so mismatched that my first reaction was confusion - as if the message belonged to another candidate.

I wrote back immediately to clear that up and I jumped into a meeting with the recruiter.

"Are you saying our expert lied?"

That was roughly the opening. Not "how did it go?" Not "what happened on the call?" An accusation dressed as a question.

I smiled and explained: no. There barely was an interview. The expert's connection made a real conversation impossible. That is not accusing anyone of lying. That is describing a failed call.

Her answer: the feedback was generated with AI, the decision was final, and there was no room to consider that their side had botched the process.

I said I understood that an expert might decide in fifteen minutes whether someone fits a role. What I could not accept was pretending that this fifteen minutes - broken audio, unfinished questions, no space to show work - was a fair sample. I was asking for a real conversation, not a favor.

She stayed in denial. As if pointing out a broken interview was an insult to the team.

Eventually: apply again later for other roles. I said fine, good afternoon, goodbye. Inside, I was furious.

I thought that was the end of it. It was not.

The plot twist I did not see coming

A few days later, the same recruiter contacted me again. They had run an internal investigation. Other candidates, it turned out, had gone through the same thing and they decided the expert would no longer conduct interviews.

They wanted to schedule a second technical interview with me, so I accepted.

A second chance that actually worked

This time the interview went properly. Real questions, real back-and-forth, a connection that stayed up. The feedback they received was positive.

After that came another call with a product manager. She walked me through what was left in the pipeline: one more interview with the end client, and a form - a very large form - listing every skill I could think of. The client's ATS was strict, she explained. If it was not on the list, it did not exist.

I spent a long time on that form. Every technology I had touched, every tool, every framework I could remember. It felt tedious, but I was already deep in the process.

Rejected by checkbox: MCP

Two weeks of silence. Then a message: they would not move forward because I had not listed MCP on the skills form.

I replied calmly. I do know MCP. I had simply not thought to put it on a list that asked for everything under the sun. That, I suggested, was partly why interviews exist - to align with the client on what actually matters, not to fail someone on a keyword they forgot to type.

The answer: the client does not give second chances. For any reason.

So after an aborted first interview, an AI rejection, an internal investigation, a successful second technical, a product manager call, and hours spent on a skills inventory, I was out - because MCP was missing from a checkbox list.

What this actually was

I am not asking companies to hire me out of pity. I am asking them not to simulate evaluation and then treat the simulation as truth.

If your expert cannot stay connected for a ninety-minute interview, reschedule. If your feedback is generated by a model, do not wave it around as expert judgment. If a candidate says the call failed, listen before you ask whether they are calling your people liars. And if you bring someone back after admitting the process failed, do not discard them two weeks later because they forgot one item on a form you told them to fill with every skill they could possibly name.

That was my experience. Keep looking for the right person. I will keep my time for processes that treat candidates like humans instead of tickets to close with a generated paragraph - or an ATS keyword they never got a chance to mention.