Oh boy, what an ordeal. To sum up, they don't know what they want.
1st round was with the recruiter. No surprises, except for the fact that for an Administration role, the salary was off by about 30%. I made this clear to the recruiter who assured me that the salary portion was 'put there as a mandatory field', and that it would increase with the amount of experience that the incumbent possessed. This gave me reassurance that they could at least 'meet' my salary range during the offer phase.
2nd round was with the direct manager, who was the entirety of the IT department, meaning they were most likely looking for the incumbent to oversee all 1st and 2nd level tasks. If that's the case, why mention anything about systems administration in the job description? Job was revealed to be a 70/30 split of support to project ratio, which made sense given the department size.
3rd round was with some director of the company (IT Manager's lead). Pretty generic talk, can't remember much about it.
4th round was with the CFO (previous guy's boss). Clearly too busy and uninterested in the IT field, but 'had to be a part of the interview process'. Boasted about the company, how great it was the work there etc. Salary came up again and he asked for a number where it would be a 'no brainer' for me to accept. After providing him a safe medium, he said that he'd give the recruiter next steps for an offer to be made.
But beforehand, they'd have me complete an external aptitude and behavioural questionnaire conducted by a 3rd party company - to which I agreed. When the time finally came, the written portion took hour and a half to complete, plus an interview portion which took another 30 minutes.
No offer ever came. Maybe it was at this point that they realized that all they wanted was an IT Support person OR that their salary ranges were completely off for either type of role. Thankfully I had meetings with other companies at the same time (which netted a real offer), otherwise, it'd have been a waste of 6 hours (over the span of 4 weeks).
