u/Extra-Progress7180

I'm posting this because my friend Maya is so broken by it that she can't even vent about it properly, and honestly, the whole thing deserves to be documented as evidence. She applied to a mid-sized PR/communications company in November, and they got back to her after two days, which, thinking about it now, should have made everyone suspicious, because when does that ever happen? Then a long obstacle course of pointless work began: a recruiter screen, a manager interview, a written strategy assignment that took up most of her Sunday, a panel with five people, a "team values" chat with someone whose official job seemed to be in charge of the vibes, another conversation with a senior director, and finally a wrap-up call where the VP told her she was "basically the profile we had in mind" and said she would hear back from them within a few days.

After six weeks of absolutely nothing, she got a generic rejection email saying they had moved forward with an internal applicant. Not even an email from a human being. A template. And they even misspelled her last name, which was like a nice little garnish on top of all the garbage. Maya eventually found out from a friend of a friend that the internal person had been unofficially lined up for the role before the posting was even published, and that the outside interviews only existed because HR needed external candidates in the system before approving the promotion.

She wasted an entire Sunday on that assignment. She presented ideas to five strangers on a Thursday afternoon. And apparently she passed the corporate vibe inspection. There honestly needs to be a public ledger for this stuff, just so everyone can see which companies run fake hiring processes and stop pretending this is normal.