Just wanted to share a recent lame interview experience. I was up to round 3 of interviews with a medium-sized consulting firm. On the Friday they asked me to prepare a 30 minute presentation with slides followed by 25 minutes of questions to deliver on Monday morning. Tough task but I felt okay to rise to the occasion and I worked on this for 6-7 hours on the weekend. When the interview starts, the interviewer starts asking normal behavioural questions and I’m wondering what’s happened. The hiring manager who briefed in this task to me was also on the call and remained silent, and I didn’t want to cut off the guy asking the questions. So it wasn’t until late into the allotted
time that I mentioned I did prepare the presentation if they want me to touch on that. The hiring manager asked me to send it through to them and then if I had any other questions.
After the call ended I was bamboozled, and then the recruiter got in touch to ask how it went and I told her it was a confusing interview and I’m not sure what happened. It wasn’t until three days later that the recruiter got back to me and explained that the hiring manager forgot to brief in the other interviewers. I said I understand that and it’s fair enough but I’ve decided to withdraw due to that incident being a red flag in addition to overall not feeling I’m a match. She was livid!
She told me how that’s not a reason to decline a job, I was being too sensitive, that they were apologetic and it’s up to me to move past this to not lose sight of the opportunity. I told her that interviews work two ways so just like if I was 15 minutes late to an interview they’d need to take that into account just like I’m taking this into account.
I was trying to be polite on the phone when what I was really thinking was that they seemed delusional, the role is set up to fail and that it seems like a nightmare to work there with a manager who won’t have my back.
She ended the call refusing my withdrawal (didn’t know that was a thing!) and saying the next step will be for her to reach out to the hiring manager to get her feedback about me(?!). Honestly I don’t get these corporations?? Now dreading her awkward follow up call with no doubt lots of comments about how I’m unreasonable and unprofessional so I welcome advice (or petty fantasies haha)