Applied online and was contacted by the VP of Growth, who requested an interview. Thought it was odd and slightly impersonal that they didn't reach out via their work email, but via an automated, no-reply system.
Set up an interview with them via a self-scheduling link they provided and learned more about the role, but I was concerned about the extremely low, below-market-rate salary of $50k-75k for a content marketing position that demands quite a lot of the person in the role and also expects a fair amount of experience to succeed. You will not do well in this role if you have little to no content marketing experience, just going off of the JD alone but especially after speaking with the VP. But when I expressed concern about the salary and asked if there was room to negotiate at the higher end, this person claimed that while there was room to negotiate, they were envisioning this as more of a junior role, hence the salary.
That doesn't fly with me. I was making more than that at my first content marketing role seven years ago, and there's no way a junior content marketer would survive in this position. They also claimed that because they've only raised Seed funding and haven't yet raised Series A, they still don't have the funds they need to pay more competitively.
They said they had some initial concerns that I was overqualified for the role, but still wanted to speak with me because they really liked my background. I was then asked to do a blog assignment and to spend no more than four hours on it. It was, of course, uncompensated. If you know nothing about compliance and the AML industry, I'm not sure how you could've gotten this done in no more than four hours and turned in the same day it was assigned. I have past knowledge in the space so I was able to do it, but it was a demanding project. I then spent an hour with the VP and another member of the team to go over my work. I found out in the course of the interview that they not only wanted a content marketer, they also expected this person to have demand gen experience, namely owning the entire nurture process end to end. They also needed to have graphic design experience to own designing assets like ebooks, because they don't have an in-house graphic designer and expect this person to be "scrappy." (Make no mistake that "scrappy" is always a red flag for "will be overworked, under-resourced, overstressed, and underpaid.") Again, this is from a team who's claiming this is more of a junior role and that's why they're paying them a laughable salary.
They told me I'd hear back from them the following Monday. By midday Monday, I hadn't heard from them, so I emailed the VP and the other employee to ask for an update. I got a near immediate reply from the VP that they went with another candidate, with no feedback or any additional explanation. I guess if I hadn't reached out, they wouldn't have bothered to follow up.
If you can't even get your story straight about what you're looking for in a candidate, chances are your company has other issues you're not disclosing. These two employees gave off weird, low-energy vibes the entire time and, while generally nice, gave me a feeling that something wasn't right. As always, my gut feeling was correct. Avoid unless you're looking for a role where you're getting underpaid for your experience and efforts.
