> The one time I engaged, they didn't even have a specific role in mind.

Big Tech hiring often focuses on candidate abilities first and then the specific job later. It's actually more efficient to do it that way than to start interviewing someone for a specific job that you discover they're not qualified for because you can match the candidate to a role after understanding where they fit in.

At many Big Tech companies there's a separate team matching phase that comes after the interview.

It's also helpful in general for us candidates because you can get a job without having to satisfy someone's arbitrary checklist of experience at prior companies.

I can appreciate the desire to focus on abilities first, but this felt like a shotgun approach to the same old checklist strategy. Like a crawler found my resume somewhere on the web based on a few keywords, and the recruiter couldn't even tell me what the keywords were.