A recruiter contacted me on LinkedIn about applying for and interviewing with the Emerge team. I spoke for 30 minutes with the recruiter, and while it was a positive conversation, they would not share the job title or salary range, and didn’t request my resume. Red flags, but I decided to move forward, giving them the benefit of the doubt because they were recruiting for a new team and expected to get a better understanding in the next round. I then met with the hiring manager for an hour (!) and received a handful of vague questions about my experiences with “technology” and “digital,” which are extremely broad topics. The interviewer had a lot of disparate follow up questions on the stories I shared, but didn’t allow me to connect the details to the overall arc of any story, and never asked about any specific technologies or techniques I had used outside of those examples. I’ve had actual difficult interviews before, but this was difficult because they were not communicating effectively. I did not feel like I wanted to move forward after the conversation. I heard back two days later I wouldn’t be anyway, because they wanted someone with more specific experience (which they still didn’t explain). I walked away with barely any further understanding of what they were trying to accomplish with this team, or what roles they were trying to hire for. Without that and just a bunch of broad questions, it’s impossible to give a focused interview that helps them understand my experience. Huge waste of time, it left a really bad impression of the company and how they approach business.