A recruiter submitted me to Kiewit and I passed a rigorous pre-screening. A successful phone interview with an HR person led to an invitation to Canada. The recruiter had sent a half-dozen candidates to Canada. He said Kiewit had treated them very well and there was a high probability of a lucrative offer. There were two interviews. The first, by two senior managers in Milton, ON, was hostile and antagonistic from the beginning. The interviewers opened by demolishing my most important resume item, talking down a major project on which I had worked for another company and on which Kiewit had had difficulties long before my time. They ignored my positive feedback about my interactions with Kiewit on the project. For the next hour-plus, they derided my fitness to work for Kiewit, deconstructing my personality questionnaire while dismissing and denying the skills and experience on my resume. One of the interviewers even disparaged my Honorable Discharge from the U.S. Navy. The recruiter persuaded me to go through with an already-arranged visit to a job site, where a senior manager hosted me. He was polite but skeptical. I was housed in a lifeless, isolated auxiliary barracks, which seemed to surprise my host. He conducted a grueling interview, several typewritten pages of difficult questions. It speaks volumes about the process that I felt relieved when my host informed me that he did not have my resume; memories of the Milton debacle, where I felt my resume had been used against me, were still fresh, and I did not give him a copy I had brought. When an urgent matter popped up, my host sent me on a field tour with a technician, who spoke well of me and asked when I would come to work there. Later on, my host said I would have six months to prove “that you won’t fail.” According to the recruiter, none of this -- the antagonism, the disparagement, the grueling process -- had ever happened to any of his previous candidates. I withdrew and ate hundreds of dollars in expenses, partly out of a sense of honor, partly because I was disgusted with Kiewit and wanted no more contact with them. Companies have a right to their opinion; Kiewit clearly thought very little of me. It's a mystery to me why they flew me all around North America to tell me so in person.