I applied for the Penetration Tester role and received an interview invitation. There were two interviewers. They explained to me one interviewer is hiring an Embedded System Engineer and the other one is hiring for a Pentester. They want to see whether I would be a good fit for either role. They asked which role I prefer, and I stated clearly I am interested in the pentester role. The interviewer hiring an embedded system engineer asked me a lot of questions about embedded system. The manager hiring a pentester asked me almost nothing about my pentest experience and skills, or anything else. He only mentioned there will be a pentest challenge. I thought he didn’t ask much because he just want to see how I do on the pentest challenge, which is a solid way to know the candidate’s technical skills. I didn’t receive any challenge. A week later I received a rejection letter. It is very strange. I made it to the interview, so there were some basic interest in me as a candidate. I showed up to the interview. They didn’t ask me much about pentesting and didn’t send me a pentest challenge as the promised. I was rejected without the chance to demonstrate any pentesting skills. One thing they get to know about me at the interview is that I am an Asian woman, which you can’t tell from my CV. The lack of questions during the interview and the challenge that was never sent to me tell me there’s something else at play. Somehow they made their decisions without knowing my professional skills. One plausible explanation is that they become uninterested in me when they saw I am an Asian woman at the interview. It is not shocking. During the last four months I started applying for jobs. On average I get 1 response out of 15 applications. Since a month ago, there’s a spike of response rate to 1 out of 10 applications. The only thing I changed on my CV is neutralizing my gender and ethnicity so it is hard to tell what gender and ethnicity I am. Mercedes-Benz is not the only company out there that didn’t give their candidate a fair shot. However, that can’t be the excuse for its unfairness and what it looks like: discrimination. I think Mercedes-Benz should have given me a technical challenge as they promised.