After talking to a recruiter, I was scheduled for a hiring manager screen. I didn’t mage it beyond this point.
During the hiring manager screen, I mentioned I had over a decade of management experience. The interviewer immediately responded saying must have read my resume wrong. They thought that was my total experience, not just my time as a manager. I felt like this was an odd point to bring up. She said that I might have too much experience for the position. I’m not sure what that means, I guess she was saying I was over qualified, but we align on salary expectations, so I don’t know why that should disqualify me. I talked about why I enjoy being a front line manager and how that is the role I’m interested in.
This frankly borders on ageism and is inappropriate to mention during an interview.
The rest of the interview went well. She asked several “tell me about a time …” questions. Due to my extensive experience, I had good situations for each of those.
About a week later I got a generic rejection email. It said that they were lucky to receive a lot of interest in the position and are moving forward with candidates whose experience more closely matches the role. Okay, fine, I’ve seen several of these, but I still feel like having too much experience is the only thing that was an issue.
A couple of days later, I received an email asking me for feedback on the interview process. I always laugh at these when they send a generic rejection. I understand a generic rejection if they never talked to me, but once you’ve done two interviews, you know why you didn’t want a candidate to move on. If you can’t take the time to provide feedback, why do you expect the candidate to give you feedback?