Honestly, this was the strangest interview experience I’ve ever had. After a brief chat with an external recruiter, I spoke with just the hiring manager for 30 minutes. I was taken aback by how fast and surface level the interview was. It was a bit of a confusing whirlwind. She asked very few questions of real substance, so I wasn’t sure how exactly she was measuring my ability to perform the necessary job functions. I found the team structure of where I would be sitting in the organization to be pretty confusing, and she gave a lot of vague answers to my questions rather than specific data, such as how many were on the team I would be on and who reported to whom. Very little attempt seemed to be made to actually assess my skills in the relevant areas. I also don’t excel at interviews in general, and shorter, small talk driven interviews are truly my Achilles heel. I get nervous. I’m a great worker, not a great charmer. I don’t need to be great at making first impressions, however, to be great at the work I do. I don’t know how exactly she formed such a hard no on me based on our brief, sparse conversation, but she must have. After the interview, I followed up via email almost immediately to thank her and ask another question that had just occurred to me about the organizational structure I would be entering into on the team, but she never responded. I followed up one more time a few days later, and again no response. She completely ghosted me, never even acknowledging my follow up attempts. Overall, it was a shockingly unprofessional interview experience. It ended up feeling more like I had lost a popularity contest without understanding the categories in which I would be judged ahead of time.