TikTok interview questions

I had such a poor experience at TikTok. My phone interviewer was lovely, but the interviewer I met with was awful. I think the whole recruiting team in Mountain View is from a foreign country. She had an accent. Anyway she grilled me hard during the interview and seemed to always look down on me, second guessing what I told her when what I said was true (how many managers I’ve had at my current company, my metrics). It was definitely not friendly. Then she told me that the role is contract to hire when I was under the impression that it was permanent. I’m not even interested in contract to hire roles. At the end, she told me that my second interviewer would not make it in to chat with me. I left feeling disappointed.

I applied on LinkedIn and got an email from a recruiter 2 weeks later to setup an “interview,” but for a different role than I applied to. It took 1 week to schedule because I kept having to bump the emails, when she finally asked if we could communicate on WhatsApp instead. The “interview,” turned out to be a phone screen with someone at ByteDance’s HQ in China. There was a strong language barrier. I was asked a few inappropriate questions about my marital status, makeup of my family, and about my personal relocation to Australia. On the call we agreed to arrange a phone interview for later that week. I was not told who it would be with but was sent a Zoom link via email. The guy I spoke to in the US was super friendly, though didn’t have a lot more to share than just enthusiasm. I asked a lot of questions, as he didn’t seem to have any prepared. I followed up with the recruiter both via email and WhatsApp over the course of the next 3 weeks before she finally said I’d be moving on to the next round (when I asked how many rounds there were, she said 5!?) and I gave her my availability for the upcoming week. A few days later, I got a WhatsApp message at 1:30PM saying she’d scheduled me for an interview at 6:30PM that evening (a Friday). I told her that was too short notice for me to prepare and she said the interviewer was very busy so she didn’t know when he’d be free next….well her next offer was Christmas Eve! I politely removed myself from the interview process after that.