I had the same experience with Canonical. They advertise hundreds of jobs in LinkedIn, in every major city around the world.
I applied for one that matched my skillset well, and the recruiter was enthusiastic about my application.
After my application was accepted, and passed the first round of scrutiny, they wanted a long and detailed cover letter answering some very specific and personal questions about your education and career. Eg. “How would your friends describe you in High School?” and “What was your least favourite subject in high school?”. Man, high school was 20 years ago, how is that relevant? And weird stuff like “how can Canonical become a global leader in Software and compete against Microsoft, Apple, and Google?”. I’m a senior software engineer, not a CEO.
I did a whole series of tests, did their online exam and weird online IQ test thing. I passed them all with very good results. Then suddenly got the rejection letter out of nowhere.
I don’t think they actually want to recruit people. They have no budget to put on new software engineers. They just want to advertise hundreds of jobs on Linkedin and send candidates through meaningless hoops for weeks to make it look like they’re recruiting.
For some reason it never occurred to me to check if others online were sharing their own bad experience of the canonical recruitment process. That would have lessened the impact a bit at the time if I knew it wasn’t just me.
I was going through two other recruitment processes at the same time, so I didn’t stop too long to think about it.