I went through three stages for the Customer Onboarding Manager role. The first two rounds were excellent — well-structured, friendly and very much aligned to my background in ERP and finance system implementations. I felt the interviewers were genuinely interested in my experience and I left both stages feeling confident that there was a strong fit. For the final round, I was asked to prepare a presentation. I based it on my experience managing ERP/finance system implementations — which the recruiter specifically told me was exactly what Tipalti wanted to see. However, the tone of the interview changed noticeably. The interviewers pushed back on ideas that are standard in most implementation environments (e.g., documenting product gaps, managing change requests, upselling time when scope grows, etc.). It became clear — but only at the end — that Tipalti has a very rigid, standardised onboarding model and doesn’t follow many of the general ERP implementation management practices used elsewhere. Because this context was never shared prior to the presentation, I was effectively judged against Tipalti-specific processes I had no way of knowing beforehand. Rather than recognising the transferable skills in my generalist presentation, the interview felt like they expected “Tipalti experience without having worked at Tipalti”. This created an unnecessarily negative environment and I realised during the meeting that I would not be selected. It felt less like an evaluation of capability and more like being pressured to answer in a way I couldn’t possibly know without internal knowledge.