The recruiter reached out, we had a great conversation, talked about compensation, then 10 days or so later I received an email stating they couldn't meet my request for compensation when they set the bar. Pretty disappointing as they didn't even give me a chance to show any skills.

Applied directly to role after seeing it on LinkedIn, heard back within a week that they wanted to do an interview. The interview I had was with a recruiter. The recruiter had a standard list of questions to ask each candidate, like a form letter. They seemed very uninterested/uninvested in our conversation and clearly didn't actually know anything about the role other than the questions they were told to ask, and just kept repeating that they "weren't technical" when I had a few questions of my own that any other technical recruiter could've answered easily. They struck me as someone who was very much only there to collect a paycheck, and it left a pretty negative impression. I got a standard rejection a week later, which is probably for the better.

First was application and no feedback for about a month. After that, an too complicated interview process with too many steps was started. In total, it was about four steps until I received an offer. Comparable companies only have one step.