I was contacted by a recruiter through LinkedIn who wanted to talk more about the position based on reviewing my profile and skillset in my current role in a different industry. We scheduled a call for roughly 10-15 minutes, but ended up speaking for an hour. The recruiter sent me the link to the job posting to apply, and also sent me a link to a personality assessment (Pymetrics) that would take roughly 30 minutes to complete. After our call went well and reviewing my Pymetrics results, the recruiter set up an interview with the Director of Sales for a few days later. I thought the interview went very well and we ended up talking for 90 minutes. The Director was very nice and wanted to setup a call with another Account Executive to give a brief overview of the position and to describe what a normal day would look like to make sure that I knew what the position was all about. Two days later, I spoke with the Account Executive for about 40 minutes and he was very honest about the pros and cons of the position. He also made sure to give me his contact information for any questions I might have so I could reach back out in the future. After the call ended, the recruiter reached back out and scheduled a call with the Regional VP of Sales for the following day based on the fact that the first two calls went well. My call with the Regional VP lasted roughly 30 minutes and was more of a high-level conversation to get to know each other and answer any additional questions I might have about the role. At the end, he said I should hear back from the company very shortly.
Coming out of those 4 calls and a personality assessment that took between 4 and 5 hours, I thought there was no way I was coming out of the process without an offer. After about a week, I still had not received any update regarding the position so I reached out to the recruiter. She called me back within 20 minutes or so to let me know that everybody gave me positive reviews based on the calls, loved by skillset, but that they were looking for somebody with experience in the industry.
In my opinion, everybody that I spoke to throughout the interview process was very nice, very professional, and genuinely seemed to love the company. However, I was very surprised that the main reason that I did not receive an offer was due to the fact that I was coming from a different industry. Considering they knew I would be coming from a different industry from the very beginning, I felt like they wasted my time and theirs. The recruiter said they would still keep me in consideration if they are not able to find someone to fill the role, but in my experience they rarely go back to someone they have interviewed previously.