OpenAI Recruiter Interview Questions
& Process

I had a first stage interview with the agency, then a second stage interview with a peer interviewer (another recruiting coordinator) who seemed genuinely engaged the whole time. They kept pointing out my experience, saying things like 'It’s great you have experience in X, that's what we need' and ended the conversation with 'I really enjoyed our conversation,' which made me feel hopeful. But only two hours later I got a rejection with no real feedback. Looking back, it all felt very insincere.

Never left a Glassdoor review before, but I had to make an account because of how negative this interview experience was. I was referred by an executive-level employee for a role on their talent team and met with their R4R recruiter, who I only knew in passing before the interview, and had heard negative things about from people who’d worked with her (I wasn’t sure if she would be my manager or not). I didn’t want that to bias my interview since her and I hadn’t interacted before and we had a mostly pleasant conversation, but there were some obvious red flags that left a terrible taste in my mouth afterward. First, the interviewer showed up about 7 minutes late to the call, apologized with a “you know how it is,” said she hadn’t read my resume or knew anything about my background or who referred me, and was multitasking the entire time. At one point, when I was going through my background, I could tell she wasn’t paying attention and I stopped and asked, “is there anything I need to clarify?” and she replied: “huh? sorry, was getting a ping from. . .someone. . .and. . .I. . .need. . .to. . .answer. . .that. . .real. . .quick”. So I wouldn’t say I got a fair or unbiased interview at that point given the total lack of attention she was paying to me. Second, when I had time to ask questions at the end (which was rushed because, again, she was 7 minutes late and had a back-to-back call), I asked: “How do you distinguish between someone who’s good in this role versus someone who’s great in this role?” and got a totally unrelated response about doing some sourcing homework (easy enough), but she also said, verbatim, “some of the things where people - we’ve seen patterns where people aren’t successful here - if you’ve come from big companies like Google and Meta and Robinhood. Our environment is very different and it’s unstructured. There aren’t defined swim lanes and guardrails and templates. We’re not looking to hire people from those companies.” Meanwhile, almost the entire recruiting team comes from Google, Meta, or Robinhood. The whole recruiting team that this person hired. I asked how the team measures the success of talent acquisition and what KPIs they use to evaluate recruiting effectiveness and she answered something like “we’re so busy that we don’t have time to think about things like that,” which is another huge red flag. Overall, I was incredibly unimpressed with how unprepared the interviewer was. I won’t blame this all on OpenAI as a company, but the R4R recruiter left such a bad impression that I messaged my referral and said “thanks but no thanks” about moving to the next step. I’m not even sure if I would have been moved forward anyway given how little attention I got during the interview.

Scheduling was timely and the team was positive and engaging, taking the time to get to know me and respond to my many questions. I’d seen some negative reviews about ghosting or curt behavior but didn’t run into that at all, even though the team was clearly busy.