I applied at Stripe a couple of years ago through their website when I was looking to switch jobs. The position I applied for was on one of their backend teams. I had 5.5 years of work experience at a FAANG, excellent university grades if they care and 6 years experience with Java (which I believe was the primary language for the role) and within 30 seconds of applying I got a rejection email. Obviously an automated email because my resume didn't have a certain keyword or keywords their bot was looking for. Weird company... I don't feel entitled to an interview but you'd think at the bare minimum a human would look at it... (or at the very least add a sleep(time.hours(6)) to make it look like a human looked at it). Made all the more funny with a recruiter from the company contacting me around the same time on linkedin for positions.
A couple of years ago I applied with a similar resume, and even wrote a cover letter because I was worried that I would be auto-rejected if I didn’t include it. I spent far too long on the cover letter, I probably spent 2 or 3 hours on it, normally I’d never do something like that but Stripe had such a great reputation on this site I figured it was a solid investment. I sent my application and heard nothing. Figured I had been ghosted and moved on. Applied, passed phone screens, passed interview loops, and received offers from other companies. The day I accepted one of those offers, some 1.5 or 2 months after I applied to Stripe, a Stripe recruiter reached out to me basically biting on the application.
How was it that 3 other companies were able to fit and entire interview cycle in in the time it took Stripe to get back to me about my application? I turned the recruiter down and wrote it off as a fluke or some sort of mixup. I’ve been ghosted before, I’ve been auto-rejected before, but I’ve never been pseudo-ghosted wherein the recruiting team effectively ghosts you by ignoring your application for 6 weeks and then reached out to you once you already had offers in hand. Weird company, for sure.
