Positions posted already have selected candidate which is usually friends with senior management. Never got a formal response and position was canceled and candidates are not informed. Also employees at risk have priority

Very quick screening call with the recruiter followed by a case study round, then an interviewing panel with stakeholders and finally the Hiring Manager interview. Good speed and decisiveness in the beginning of the process and then once I had gone through the full interviewing process they completely dropped the ball and went radio silent. When I reached out for a follow up I was told to wait. Eventually I got a short standard type of email informing me they had identified other better qualified candidates for the role - that's the kind of generic email you can send someone you decide not to invite for an interview at all, but it hardly sounds plausible after someone has gone through a full interview process. Also unprofessional, in my opinion (and I say this having been a recruiter myself in the past), to communicate the outcome of an interviewing process via standard email rather than calling a candidate who has gone through multiple interviews and invested time and energy in your process - it's a matter of respect. To sum it up, I thought the role was very interesting, the case study was thought-through well, the people I met through the interview process were great and all in all I felt like I would love to work for Adidas. However, in the end I was left feeling like they were not well organised (some information seemed to change throughout the process, like for example where this role would sit structurally within the organisation) and all of a sudden the pace of their process completely slowed down. Some thoughts on improving the candidate experience: A) If you set a certain pace for the process, then you want to maintain it throughout (especially at the end of the process you don't want candidates to start to wonder and lose motivation), B) If you have unplanned delays in the hiring process then communicate clearly and proactively around those, C) Be thoughtful about how you communicate the outcome of the hiring process, especially if you're not making an offer to a candidate you interviewed. Oh, and if you use this opportunity to encourage candidates to apply again in the future - be sure you treated them in a way that will make them feel valued and respected so they will want to interview with you again.