I withdrew my application after the Final Interview after many red flags. Here’s why:
I encountered 3 people here: Office Manager, HR Manager and Hiring Manager for department, all whom were very friendly. However, response and follow up time was very slow. At one point,
ES ghosted me for a week+. When ES finally decided to follow up with me to schedule the Final Interview, they displayed a LOT of urgency and wanted to schedule the interview ‘ASAP’. To which, they sent me 4 research heavy questions to answer, put in a Google Slide and lead the discussion in the “hour” long interview (more on that at the end) All 4 questions were centered around TheGrio, HBCUs, Black Culture and Black Media. A very odd request to a Black candidate (myself) coming from a panel of non-Black interviewers. This rubbed me the wrong way for obvious reasons. (During the interview I asked if this will be the roles primary focus, they said NO. This left me more upset this is what they decided to focus on).
Nonetheless, I gave them the benefit of the doubt and proceeded with the interview. In the back of my mind, I couldn’t help but feel I was being used. These questions in no way, shape or form displayed my skills of abilities. However, me answering these questions did save them hours of research.
At the conclusion of the interview the HR and Hiring Managers were ready to end the call, 30 minutes in and we had only discussed my answers to their questions! They had no follow up questions nor planned for enough time for my final round questions to them.
I managed to squeeze in a couple questions. One of them being: What DE&I initiatives do ES have and how diverse is the team (since the digital content is primarily Black centric and everyone I spoke to at ES was a non-minority). They simply danced around my question. One of the managers summed it up to “we have nothing in state currently but plan to initiate something soon.” At the very, very end of the call, they finally told me the salary for the role and it was significantly below my range and needs.
Therefore, everyone’s time was wasted. I put in hours of free labor doing research for them when the role was never within my salary range. This could have been avoided if this information wasn’t withheld from me and the appropriate person had emailed me back before the interview. They had days to do so. This experience left me feeling used, manipulated and led on.
It was within my best interest to pull my application and focus on other opportunities.
Lesson learned to trust my gut.
