I applied for the role of product marketing manager and was contacted by a recruiter. The recruiter scheduled an interview with the hiring manager. The hiring manager is based in Connecticut and previously worked with a former boss of mine but something about the hiring manager seemed sinister and I believe he already knew I worked under his former colleague. There are not enough words to add here how I suspected something seemed incredibly off with the hiring manager. Not the warmest and not kindest person. At least he wasn’t towards me. Needless to say I was ghosted after that interview . The unprofessionalism is incredible in 2024.

I applied for the product marketing manager role at Workday for their Peakon employee voice product. The first round was a phone call with HR which was around general motivation, why you want to join Workday and previous experience. Throughout the call, I was appreciated to be passionate and energetic and it was overall a good experience. The second round of interviews was with the product marketing manager which was a video call and I was asked in detail about my core skills, briefed about the role in detail, and also questioned about my previous work experience. Once again the interviewer was very professional and the discussion was good. The third round of interviews was with someone from the product management team of the product. Once again the questions were exactly similar to the ones with the interview I had with the product marketing manager. I didn't understand the point of having two different video interviews with almost the same questions in a span of a few days. However that is not the main part, I was asked questions like your biggest achievements in product marketing, how did you handle negative situations, how did you break a piece of bad news to the sales teams, and what was your biggest failure, I answered all the questions to my very best in a passionate and energetic tone. 2 weeks passed after this third video interview and I didn't have any update, so I mailed the HR asking for an update and she gave me a phone call saying sorry we are not taking your profile forward and gave me a feedback saying I was overconfident and some humility will help me in my future interviews. In my history of giving interviews, no one has ever given me a silly feedback like this. It takes so many years to build confidence and answer questions boldly, this feedback certainly shattered my confidence. The problem was the last interviewer clearly had a problem with my profile and was openly disinterested in my profile from the beginning of the one-hour video interview and I'm sure it definitely had to play with my ethnicity and background. In a world of equal opportunities, it was such a bad experience. This feedback and update also took 2 weeks to come after following up, soo much for a recruitment platform in the first place. Had I not answered the questions confidently the interviewer would have given me a not confident feedback, such was the horrifying nature of my interview process.