I received an email about 2 months after I applied to schedule a call for a phone screen. I was asked about my background and to basically give a verbal description of my resume. I got the basic questions like "why Halverson" and I was asked to describe the work I did in the past before I got my PhD. I also described some of my research. The person interviewing me seemed to be unsure of what he should ask me, and he was incredibly vague about the skill set he was looking for (I am not sure if he was being vague or if he even knew what that skill set was - he seemed very disorganized). For example, did he want a quantitative person or not? He seemed to want to "trick" me into admitting that doing statistical analysis was not my passion (he would ask questions around this issue, never making it clear if the issue was significant) - but I don't operate this way. I just openly said what I like and do not like. I do not have a PhD in stats, but I understand stats. Most importantly, it is not where I excel. He had no reaction to this, which was a little odd. The whole interview was so vague and bizarre from his end. I got absolutely no indication of what he wanted or what responses I said resonated with him. I might as well have just been talking to myself. There was no conversation here. It was just a classic case of a person who doesn't know how to interview properly and makes judgments based on biases and heuristics (which any social science PhD should know about) - since there are no clear objectives that he seemed to have. Then, he supports his snap judgement in a post-hoc rationalization. Social psych 102. I still have no idea what he wanted, since he has refused to write back to me about the status of the job which I found rather unprofessional and rude a month later.
Now to get to the part that will make all the readers hate me: The interviewer has a PhD from Louisiana State, and I have a PhD from Harvard. However, school names really don't matter to me at all. I just want to mention it for a few reasons. First, I have repeatedly been recognized by very senior tenured professors at Harvard for the social psych experimental methods that I created which were extremely creative & never used before. This could be pretty significant for a market research firm, I would think. I offered to provide references to these professors to him, but he was not interested. Aside from my PhD, I also worked for 5 years in consulting and marketing. One thing I have heard from recruiters and job coaches (repeatedly) is that insecure people seem to have issues hiring someone from a school like Harvard, so maybe that was part of the problem here too. I explained that I am from Chicago and I moved back, so I am not the "Harvard stereotype" at all - and perhaps I go overboard trying to seem friendly in interviews so that I don't lose out to this bias. But, something went wrong that I cannot identify.
Since I heard nothing for weeks, I followed up with an email to request status. The interviewer could not even be bothered to reply or to send a form letter rejection. This unprofessional behavior is why I am posting this negative review here. A bad interview is par for the course in a job search, but ignoring me after I spent hours reviewing your website and preparing for the interview is not right (and is becoming the norm which is ridiculous - it takes 60 seconds to write a rejection). I have no idea what the problem was with the interview, and I will probably never know. Despite his psychology PhD and years of studying human behavior, this person could not even tell me why I was not a fit for this position. How ironic. But, this "rejection" really bothered me since it seemed like one of the more interesting companies I interviewed with. However, I can't work with people who can't communicate, and driving to a tiny office way out West of the city every day sounded like a headache. So, that's that. I'll never get to test out the fancy customer eyeball tracking glasses, and that's unfortunate. There is a lot that they do that seems interesting, but the website was a lot more informative than the interviewer was.
They should really treat their interviewees better given that we could easily become their clients. I got a job elsewhere (that is right up their alley), but this rudeness has made me want to veto any possibility that they would get a contract with us.
