How to steal marketing plans from candidates:
1) Phone call with the recruiter
All good, the recruiter was nice and helpful. She messed up a little and set up a video call instead of a phone call which created confusion during the actual interview between me and the hiring manager.
2) Case Study: Marketing plan composed of 9 key elements
An awful amount of questions for such a low-paid role. The hiring manager asked to create an entire back to school marketing plan. I tend to prepare very good works for these interviews so it took me a couple of days of work.
3) Interview with the hiring manager
They said they reviewed my work and offered an interview. Here things got extremely awkward. I interviewed with the two senior marketing people who thought it was a phone call while the recruiter set up a video call to review the work I've done. I had the impression they were both extremely uninterested in hiring me and already discarded me as an option not sure why - maybe because I'm a man and the hiring manager was looking for a woman colleague but I can't tell. Sadly the case study review interview involved not a single word about the 15 pages marketing plan I prepared for free for them.
The atmosphere was extremely tense and I had the feeling the two of them were not in a great professional relationship and the interview was basically lead by myself cause they looked quite exhausted for some reasons.
The more senior interviewer asked a ton of questions randomly picking details and numbers from my CV right in front of me but I could tell he wasn't even sure about what role he was actually interviewing for. Then the actual hiring manager asked me what I could bring to the team so I answered her and then I asked how big is the team and they said that they were in 4 but 3 people left so now only the hiring manager was left in the team I asked how come is that and they ignored my question. It was an extremely awkward moment and it gave me a very bad impression about them.
So at the end of the meeting, I asked whether they checked my work as I put a lot of hours of work on it and the hiring manager said it was nice but she didn't agree on a few points but she would reserve her comments for the presentation. I thought that that interview was the presentation but never mind.
Well, the presentation never happened because I've been sent an email by the recruiter saying that the hiring manager thought I'm too experienced for the role so they went ahead with other candidates. This is obviously such an unprofessional excuse from a company that clearly DOESN'T CARE especially because they even promoted the job ad on LinkedIn right after my final interview.
In the end, I got 0 feedback and a fake excuse to reject my application after preparing an entire plan for them and a 3 weeks process. This is the typical marketing copy/picking strategy from candidates executed by a not competent and serious company - SCAM.