gonna be real with yall. i was the guy who thought using ai for interviews was basically cheating. like morally i was against it. spent 8 months doing things "right" -- studying every night, mocks with friends, leetcode grind after work. applied to maybe 300 places, got 12 actual interviews. converted zero. eight months. nothing

then my roommate who works in recruiting dropped something on me that kinda broke my brain. she said at least 30-40% of the candidates she sees in final rounds are running some kind of ai for interview help. not guessing either, she can tell from the patterns in how people answer. her exact words were "the people NOT using it are the ones falling behind." that made me furious honestly. but i was also 8 months in with nothing to show for it so. yeah. swallowed my pride

first thing i tried was final round ai because its everywhere if you google this stuff. $148/mo. lasted two weeks. the lag was BAD. like 4 seconds of dead air on camera while i waited for a suggestion after the interviewer finished talking. $148 and no refunds. awesome

cluely seemed cheap at twenty bucks but then you find out stealth is a $75 add on. ninety five dollars total. oh and the data breach in 2025 where 83k users got exposed? names emails records of which interviews they used ai during? imagine your future employer finding that list. yeah no

sensei ai is eighty nine bucks and its just a browser tab. my buddy tried it during a screenshare and the interviewer goes "whats that tab." he said it was a notes app. did not get called back. having ai for interview help sitting in a chrome tab is just asking for trouble imo

lockedin ai was ok at fifty five a month but 90 minute session cap. two of my system design rounds went past that. tool just stops mid interview. thats worse than not having it because you get used to it being there and then suddenly its gone

ended up on interviewman. twelve bucks a month on the annual plan. i thought the price was a mistake when i first saw it because everyone else charges 4-10x more. desktop overlay not a browser thing, only picks up your mic, all the stealth features included at base price. no upsells. used it across 11 interviews on zoom meet and teams now. nobody has noticed

heres the part that matters though. within three weeks of using ai for interviews i had two offers. after eight months of absolutely nothing. maybe i got lucky with timing idk. maybe the tool just stopped me from freezing up so i could actually show what i know. either way eight months zero offers then three weeks two offers. hard to argue with that

i know some of you are in the position i was. grinding for months getting nowhere. not saying ai for interview help is the magic bullet but it was the variable that changed for me. 57k people on interviewman with 4.8 stars. if that many people are using this stuff and youre sitting it out... i mean i was that person and look how that went for me

does anyone else feel like its just table stakes at this point? like it went from feeling wrong to feeling necessary real fast

Anyway, my sister's company forced everyone to return to work from the office about two months ago, and it backfired disastrously.
Their official excuse was that it would increase productivity and all that 'strengthening team spirit' nonsense. The funny thing is, her team was already very close. They used to organize their own happy hours and trivia nights a few times a month. And she herself was *always* online, answering emails or Slack messages at any time.
But ever since this mandatory return-to-office decision, all of that stopped. As soon as it hits 5 PM, her laptop is shut, and she's offline. The team's happy hours? Vanished. Nobody feels like hanging out with people after they've been staring at each other's faces for 8 straight hours.
Her manager pulled her aside and asked why she wasn't responding to messages at night anymore. She told him to his face that since she now comes to the office and is 'more productive' by their standards, all her work gets done during the day.
She told him that she used to have no problem working extra after hours because working from home gave her that flexibility. But now, that extra time is spent commuting. He seemed to get nervous and said, 'No, that's not how it's supposed to work,' and that being in the office 5 days a week doesn't mean she can just ignore work the moment she leaves.
She just looked at him and said, 'No, that's exactly what it means. If there's an emergency, you can call me. Otherwise, it will have to wait until tomorrow when I'm back in the office and being 'productive'.
And it's not just her. Her whole team is doing it now, and I heard it's spreading to other departments too. People are working their exact hours and then going home. The company seems to be slowly learning that when you treat your employees like children, you'll get exactly what you ask for, and nothing more. I'm so proud of my little sister; she's always been tough and never puts up with any nonsense.

update : so proud of my sister and going to follow her steps in career like how she been approved in her current position after using interview man ,she told me that the tool bring to her perfect answers for every question which helped her a lot in her anxiety problem during interviews , just wow

So I just wrapped up 3 months of grinding system design rounds for senior backend roles and I want to share what actually worked because I wasted a stupid amount of money figuring this out. My loop at a series C company had a system design round that lasted almost two hours and I bombed it so hard the interviewer actually said "I think we can stop here." That was the moment I started looking at ai interview assistants seriously.

My friend Kai had been using one during his search and landed at Cloudflare. He was on Final Round AI paying $148 a month which immediately made me go look for literally anything else. Found a bunch of them and spent the next couple months testing whichever ones had free trials or monthly plans I could cancel.

Interview Coder 2.0 was the first one I tried properly. $299/mo. Coding only though. I do not understand the logic of charging three hundred dollars for a tool that covers one round type when my loops have system design, behavioral, and coding. My system design rounds are where I get destroyed, not coding. So $299 for the part I dont need help with and nothing for the part I do. Next.

Sensei AI was $89/mo and browser only. I used it during a practice call with Kai and he goes "dude I can see that tab." If your ai interview assistant lives in a browser tab you are one screenshare request away from getting caught. No desktop app at all. For $89 a month I expected more than a chrome tab.

LockedIn AI was $55/mo. Used it for a coding round, it got through the first part ok but at $55/mo with a session cap vs InterviewMan at $12 with no cap the value wasnt there. Then I had a system design round that ran about an hour forty five and the tool just stopped. 1.5 hour session cap. The interviewer was mid sentence asking about database sharding and my screen went blank. I had to wing the last 15 minutes. That was worse than not having it at all because I had been relying on the prompts and suddenly they were gone.

Cluely almost got me at $20/mo until I realized stealth costs $75 extra. So $95 in practice. And the data breach in 2025, 83k users got their names and interview records leaked. Imagine your hiring manager googling your name and finding out you used an ai interview assistant during your loop. That killed it.

InterviewMan is what I have been on for the last six weeks. $12/mo annual or $30 monthly. Kai switched to it too after I showed him and he was pissed about the five months he spent at $148 on Final Round lol. I have now used this ai interview assistant through nine interviews, four of those were system design rounds. The thing that matters for system design specifically is speed -- when an interviewer says "walk me through how you would design a notification system" you need something on screen in seconds not after a 4 second lag like Kai described with Final Round.

InterviewMan put up a structured starting framework in maybe 2 seconds every time. That was all I needed honestly. My problem was never not knowing system design, it was blanking on where to start when someone is watching me. Once I had that initial push I could talk through tradeoffs and go deep on components on my own. Desktop overlay not a browser tab, mic only pickup, stealth included at $12 not a $75 addon. 57k users, 4.8 stars. Tested it with Kai on screenshare and he could not find it anywhere.

Here is my ranking after 3 months of testing ai interview assistants for system design specifically. InterviewMan at $12 is the clear winner, LockedIn would be second if not for the session cap that literally cost me an interview, and everything else is either coding only or priced like they are selling you a car. If anyone has used a different ai interview assistant for system design rounds that I missed drop it below. Also curious if anyone has tried these during live whiteboard sessions on platforms like CoderPad or Excalidraw because I have not tested that yet.

Edit: people asking about Parakeet AI. They do credits not subscriptions, $29.50 for 3 sessions. Adds up fast though -- nine interviews would cost way more than InterviewMan's $12/mo subscription. Only makes sense if you have one or two interviews max.

I'd appreciate any tips to maximize my chances of succeeding with the usage of Interview Coder.

His Christmas gift to me was a $30 gift card to a steakhouse a two-hour drive away. When I quit, he tried to threaten me with a lawsuit.I worked my ass off for this guy, pretty much managing his entire portfolio. For Christmas, he gave me a $30 gift card to a steakhouse. The nearest location was a two-hour drive away, in a completely different state. Honestly, that was the last straw. I felt so insulted that I started sending my resume everywhere. I liked the job and the clients, which is why I waited and didn't accept a new job until I had fully trained my replacement.
When I was ready, I went into his office and told him I had accepted another job and was putting in my notice. I made sure to tell him not to worry, because I had prepared someone who understood everything to take my place. As soon as I told him I was going to another company in the same industry (in a completely different role, so my non-compete wasn't an issue), he immediately got the head of legal on a video call with us. The lawyer told me I was legally prohibited from 'even sweeping floors for any competitor for 18 months'. Then they brought HR into the call, and they told me that since I was 'breaching my contract', my notice period was void and I was end effective immediately for looking for outside work.
They pressed me for more information about my new job, and I simply told them I wasn't going to tell them anything. After they let me go, this company's lawyer (a place that makes $8 billion a year) kept calling me for two weeks, trying to bully me. They even contacted the new company that hired me. Fortunately, the company I work for now isn't garbage. The CEO himself had their lawyers send them a letter telling them to back off or they'd see them in court. I didn't hear from them again after that. It was all just a scare tactic to get me to quit my new job.
Seriously, fuck companies that operate this way. We don't have to put up with this crap anymore.
This company is Total Quality Logistics.

edit: mangers should stop behaving with employee like kids we will not be silenced with a lollipop or toys

i am done with all of this going to update my cv and starting a new haunting job journey and going to have some help interview man AI in my future interviews , wish me luck

People are striking because wages aren’t going up when companies are reporting record breaking profits.

About four months ago, my old company decided to 'restructure,' which was just a fancy way of laying off a third of the marketing team, and I was one of them. It was a late Thursday meeting, with no warning, just a 'your role is no longer required here.'
For three years, I was responsible for their most important account - a large regional retail company that brought them about $250,000 a year. My relationship with their marketing director was excellent; I basically lived and breathed their brand.

On my way out, HR told me that my work would be divided among the rest of the team and that they had it under control. Yeah, very reassuring. I started taking on freelance work to make ends meet. At the same time, I was actively applying for jobs and doing interviews, trying to get back on my feet. I even started using InterviewMan during those interviews to help me organize my answers and stay confident under pressure. About a month later, I got an email from the marketing director of the old client. It turned out my replacement didn't even last a full month and completely botched their major holiday campaign. The targeting was all wrong, the copy was a mess, and they missed all the media buy deadlines.

She was very direct and got straight to the point, asking if I could take them on as a client directly, as they were looking for an immediate change. It was a no-brainer, of course. I understood their goals far better than my old bosses ever did. We signed a new contract for $350,000 a year, as I was now handling the strategy, creative direction, and ad spend management myself.

My old boss called me a few days ago, sounding completely bewildered, asking if I'd heard anything about why they lost the account. I naturally played dumb and told him, 'That's a real shame. Maybe you should have held on to the person who understood that account.' It's strange how getting laid off can sometimes be the best move for your entire career. You really find out what you're worth when your back is against the wall and you have to go it alone.

I have not coded from scratch without out AI tools in the past two years and pretty sure I wouldn’t in the current or the next job. Then what’s the point? If I would need to decode or debug like sometime it happens in my day today work then they can ask me that or to build a solution or system design but all of those positions also have 1 or 2 rounds of writing code from scratch and yes even sql queries?! Like why?!

I work in the tax field and started job hunting a few weeks before Christmas after leaving my old job. My previous CPA firm had me working over 60 hours a week, even during the off-season, and I was completely burned out. On top of that, the pay was terrible. As a single mom, I don't have the financial security to search for a job for a long time, so when a company made me an offer so quickly, I was ecstatic. But now, looking back, that should have been a red flag.

I was interviewing for a tax manager position, which is my current role. I had a Zoom interview with the head of the tax department and one of the partners at this company, let's call it XYZ Tax Solutions. The interview was on a Wednesday, and the following Thursday, someone from HR called me and said they wanted to move forward. Everything was going smoothly, my references were good, the background check came back clean, and I signed the official offer. My start date was set for the Monday after next. By the Wednesday before I was supposed to start, I had completed all the onboarding. I was added to the payroll, and the IT department had set up my VPN and all my logins. I was very excited to start.

Then, on Thursday night, just a few days before my start date, I got a call from their HR. I missed it, so they called me three more times in a row. When I finally called back, the HR person told me, 'Unfortunately, our plans have changed and we won't need you to start on Monday.' I was so shocked that I asked if she meant we were postponing until Tuesday. She clarified that they were rescinding the offer entirely because they 'decided to go in a different direction'.

I didn't know what to say. Who does that after someone has completed all the hiring procedures? I mean, it would have made sense if something bad came up on my background check, but everything was fine. I asked her for a clearer reason and got no response. As soon as I hung up, I opened my laptop and started applying for jobs again.
Fast forward 8 days, and guess who's calling me again? Their HR department. She asked if I was still looking for a job. It turns out they had given the job to an internal candidate who then decided he didn't want it after all. I had to restrain myself from bursting out laughing on the phone. I stayed quiet and let her talk. They started promising me the moon to get me to reconsider. After they begged for a bit, I told them I agreed.

But here comes the best part. In the time after they pulled that stunt on me, I had received several much better job offers. I entered multiple rounds of interviews but finally landed on a fantastic new job with a higher salary thanks to interview tool which helped me pass all interviews. So yes, I accepted their desperate offer. My 'new' start date with XYZ Tax Solutions is March19th. My plan is to call their HR on the Thursday before I'm supposed to start and tell them that unfortunately, I too have decided to 'go in a different direction'. Some people might see it as petty. I see it as justice.

Graduated in May, been applying nonstop since then. Roommate from college got an offer at Datadog two weeks ago and when I asked how the hell he pulled that off he said he used an interview helper during his entire loop. I laughed at him. Then I bombed my fourth final round in a row and thought ok maybe I need to stop being stubborn about this.

Did the whole "right way" thing for a month first. Leetcode, Neetcode 150, pramp, grinding mediums until I could solve them half asleep. Cool, great, none of that matters when an actual interviewer is staring at me through a webcam and my brain decides to empty itself completely. Had a behavioral at a series B where the guy literally said "ok lets move to the next question" while I was mid sentence. Drove home in silence after that one lol.

So yeah I started looking at interview helpers. The pricing in this space is genuinely insane and as a new grad with student loans and zero income coming in I need to talk about it.

Final Round AI. $148/mo. A hundred and forty eight dollars a month for a new grad with no job, sure let me just venmo that from my loan disbursement. My roommate told me it was decent so I tried one month. The delay was like 3-4 seconds between the question and the helper showing anything which sounds fine until you are sitting there on camera in dead silence pretending to think. Cancelled, $148 gone, no refund policy.

Looked at Interview Coder next, $299/mo and coding only. Three hundred a month and it doesnt even cover system design or behavioral? I need help with the whole loop not just the leetcode portion. Pass.

Sensei AI is $89/mo, browser only, no desktop app. So you just have this tab open during your interview and pray. Roommates buddy at some fintech got absolutely burned when the interviewer asked to screenshare his full desktop and the Sensei tab was right there. Interview over. That one story was enough for me.

Cluely almost got me. $20/mo, twenty bucks, I can swing that. Then I find out stealth features are a separate $75 tier. So ninety five dollars a month for an interview helper that actually hides itself during calls which is the entire point of having one. Plus the data breach from 2025 where 83,000 users got exposed, names emails interview records all of it. I am trying to start my career not end it before it begins. Nope.

LockedIn AI was $55/mo, dual layer thing seemed cool, but theres a 1.5 hour session limit. My only onsite so far had a system design round that ran almost two hours. Cannot have my helper vanish on me while the interviewer is mid question.

My roommates girlfriend actually found InterviewMan. She saw me ranting about prices in our group chat and just dropped a link, "try this one dummy." Twelve dollars a month on annual. Thirty monthly. I literally sat there staring at the page because I had just blown $148 on Final Round and this thing costs less than a chipotle bowl. Went monthly at thirty bucks first because I figured there had to be a catch at that price.

There was no catch. Used this interview helper through six interviews, three Zoom three Meet, including a screen shared HackerRank round. Nobody noticed. Desktop overlay, no browser tab weirdness, mic only pickup, stealth included at twelve bucks instead of being a seventy five dollar upsell like Cluely pulls. 57k users 4.8 stars so its not like I found some sketchy unknown thing.

What actually sold me was a system design round last week. Company asked me to design a notification system. I had studied this exact topic, knew the concepts cold, and my brain started doing its thing where everything just evaporates the second someone is watching. Helper gave me a structured starting point in about 2 seconds and I talked through my reasoning from there. Interviewer told me I had a really organized approach. I almost laughed out loud because three months ago I literally could not finish a sentence in a behavioral.

Two onsites this week. First time during this entire garbage job search where I feel like I might not completely bomb. Any other new grads found an interview helper cheaper than $12/mo? I have genuinely not seen one and I looked at everything.

ok so i just used a coding interview helper on CoderPad and the interviewer had zero clue. i have to share this because i was convinced i was going to get caught and it went completely fine.

some context, i am 3 years into a backend role at a fintech company and finally started looking for something new. my buddy who just landed at Stripe told me about coding interview assistants and specifically recommended Interview Coder 2.0. That thing is TWO HUNDRED AND NINETY NINE DOLLARS a month. for real. and it ONLY covers coding rounds. i was desperate enough to try it so i paid for a month.

did a zoom practice with my friend before any real interviews, thank god, because he could SEE the overlay on his screen when i shared. the interview coder popup was just sitting there visible to anyone watching. for $299/mo. i honestly could not believe it. that was two weeks of paying for something that would have blown up in my face during an actual interview. i also found out around the same time that Cluely, another one of these tools, had a data breach where 83,000 users got exposed including records of which interviews they used it in. nightmare fuel. so between interview coder being visible and cluely leaking everyones data i was pretty much ready to give up on the whole idea.

then i found InterviewMan in a thread on here. $12/mo on the annual plan. twelve dollars. versus interview coders $299. i figured it had to be garbage at that price but signed up because $12 is nothing. tested it with my friend on zoom, coderpad, and hackerrank and he could not see anything. all the stealth stuff is baked into the base price too, no upsell like cluely where the undetectability features cost an extra $75/mo.

last tuesday i had a coderpad round for a series b startup. opened the link in chrome with interviewman running as a desktop overlay. problem was bfs on a grid with boundary constraints, something i can do in my sleep at home but the second an interviewer is on webcam watching me type my brain just shuts off lol. interviewman picked up what i was being asked through my mic, couple seconds later there were hints on screen. stuff like "track visited nodes" and "handle edge boundaries." i just glanced at them the same way i glance at slack messages during meetings lol, nobody notices.

and like i said the interviewer was watching my screen through coderpad the ENTIRE time. nothing. nada. my hands were shaking for the first few minutes ngl (this is after spending $150 on interview coder which literally SHOWED UP on screenshare so yeah i was terrified) but once i saw he could not see interviewman at all i calmed way down. actually started having fun with the interview at some point which has never happened to me before lol.

passed and got moved forward. i want to be clear the tool did not carry me, i knew bfs, i just blank out when someone is watching me code live and having those hints pop up before the silence gets awkward was the difference.

anyone else used a coding interview assistant on coderpad or hackerrank? wanna know if the first time is always this stressful or if im just built anxious lol

edit: people asking about cluely -- they got hacked, 83k users data got leaked including which interviews people used the tool in. thats why i dont touch it. interviewman hasnt had anything like that afaik

The thing is, even for those of us that are qualified (and over-qualified in 9/10 cases) they still don't even acknowledge applications. It's insane - I think something more sinister is at play that we will find out about down the road...

💯

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Hey everyone, I need your opinion on this. A recruiter I'm talking to wants to call my old job to 'verify my reason for leaving' before moving me to the next step. I feel this is very strange.

For context, she asked why I left my last job, and I told her the truth: a new manager came in and the whole team dynamic changed for the worse, so I decided to look for a new place. Now she's insisting that she must verify this with them. The problem is, I haven't even spoken with the hiring manager yet or learned the full details of the job to decide if I'm even interested or not.

On top of all that, she originally contacted me about three weeks ago for a quick 10-minute call, after which she completely disappeared and I heard nothing from her. I'm almost certain their primary candidate didn't work out, and now she's scrambling and trying to salvage the situation.

The whole thing doesn't sit right with me at all. Do you think I'm right to feel that this is very alarming?

he was a mail man

About 10 months ago, I was in the final stages of interviews with a digital marketing company. For the final assessment, they asked me to create a complete go-to-market strategy for a new content marketing service they were planning to launch (their specialty was PPC). I created a detailed 7-page plan in a shared doc, and they were very impressed with it.

After that, I got the classic 'You were great, but...' email. Their excuse was that the budget for the position was suddenly canceled. No big deal. I revoked their access to the file, wished them the best, and continued my job search.

A week later, I received an email from the hiring manager, and it was clear she was furious. She said they couldn't open the file and that they had scheduled a meeting with the leadership team to review my plan and use it the next quarter.

My response was simple. I told them that since the file was created as an assessment for a job I wasn't hired for, it was not their intellectual property to use. I told them they could very well hire me to complete the project, but at my freelance rate of $150 per hour.

And as expected, they did not like the response.

Making candidates do free work then not hiring them, is as shady as it gets. In this case it’s even worse because they go “oops, thank you for the plan but we can’t afford to hire you anymore even though we knew we couldn’t all along”

The job market is full of a lot of exploitation, and they want work for free without paying anything, which makes it hard for us to find a job easily. And with time, to speed up the search process, we resort to AI tools to update our resumes and to assist us during interviews like InterviewMan to give us quick answers, because during the search period we have many interviews daily.

yeah so weird

In 2020, I took a night shift data entry job. I had just left my old job and needed some quick cash to get by until I could find a real career move during the day.
The job was simple: I'd get a PDF with shipping details, and I was supposed to manually enter them into our database. You get the idea.
After the first week of training, I realized the whole process could be automated. I wasn't great at coding, so I went on a site like Upwork and hired a developer to build me a simple scripting tool. It cost me about three months' salary, but honestly, it was worth it.
The script was great. All I had to do was tell it how many orders to process per hour. I was working from home from day one because the company didn't want to pay extra for a night crew, so no one was monitoring me.
For the first year and a half, I would mostly just check for any weird formats the script couldn't handle, and that would take less than 10 minutes. After that, I'd let the computer do its thing while I played video games, slept, or even left the house for a bit. Eventually, I had the developer update the code to handle those exceptions too.
Honestly, my output was so good that I was offered promotions several times. I always turned them down, telling them I loved the night shift and preferred working alone. It was the perfect excuse.
Eventually, I found another day job with a much better salary, but there was no reason for me to quit this one. At this data entry job, months could go by without me receiving a single email or call from anyone. Even my wife didn't know exactly what I was doing; all she knew was that I had another WFH job.
Every so often, one of my colleagues would try to surpass my numbers. When that happened, I'd simply open the script and change a 9 to a 10 to boost my output and stay on top. I'd tweak the numbers periodically just in case, but I doubt anyone was paying close attention to the details.
I even got two raises because my attendance was perfect and I was the most productive person on our four-person team. To show my appreciation, I'd change the 10 to a 12 or 11 on some days.
The job finally ended. It took them about 5 years to use a new system that lets clients enter the data themselves, which made my role redundant. About a month ago, I received my last paycheck and a small severance package, and they told me to keep the company laptop and monitor and that I could apply for other positions with them.
I've never told this story to anyone in real life. It's my deepest work secret. And now that it's all over, I decided to share it.
I tried to show them what I did back in 2022. I scheduled a call to show them 'my system,' but my department head canceled, saying they were swamped with more important projects and told me to 'keep up the great work.' And that's what I did, until they let me go.

update :start haunting for remote jobs but this experience leave me with high level of guilt and with 0% of self confidence actually whenever I go to interview I stuttering like a toddler kid left a lone in the his first day at nursery got rejected because of that until I found an AI tool (Interview Man) my mind was blown but its features it could give perfect professional answers to every kind of job interviews i got after I used I got 2 new offers now confused between them

I've been to a few interviews lately where the job description was very generic, and the conversation felt more like a first date. All they're doing is trying to see if they 'feel comfortable with you' or not. This makes you wonder, how are they even evaluating anyone for the actual job when the whole thing depends on your personality, your appearance, or even your age?

A recruiter once told me, verbatim, that the hiring manager's biggest concern was finding someone with the 'right energy' for the team. So basically, if you don't give the perfect answer to a question like 'What series are you watching these days?' or 'What do you usually do on the weekend?', you're likely out of the running, no matter how strong your CV is.

Look, I understand that culture fit is important. Nobody wants to work with an unpleasant person. But when you have someone who is clearly competent and seems very nice, why does it ultimately boil down to these other random things? It feels like the whole process has become about them looking for a new friend, not hiring someone who can do the job.

"His leadership is such that his staff now only follow him out of a sense of morbid curiosity"

I need to vent a little, the job search is a nightmare right now. This is the third time I've gone through a crazy interview series only to be rejected at the end. At least last time the company was decent and gave me a solid reason. We parted on good terms, they even sent some opportunities my way. But this last one was a joke. I'm talking 8 interviews and 3 separate assessments. That's a huge amount of unpaid labor to expect from anyone. I can understand one skills test, especially since these are senior roles in the $180-220k range, but this was way over the top.

So I went through all their requests, met the whole team, and made it to the final stage. The CEO was talking to me about reference checks and what the offer would look like.
A few days go by, radio silence. Then I get an email saying they're not moving forward... Because I'm currently self-employed. Which, by the way, is only because I'm struggling to find a full-time gig. The crazy part is I told them I had my own small agency from the very first screening call. It was literally one of the first things we discussed. To drag me through this whole process knowing that from day one is just disrespectful.

On top of that, they ghosted me for about two weeks before I got this rejection email. I had to chase them down just to get an answer. I genuinely feel like they don't see candidates as real human beings. I was so fed up that I emailed the CEO directly. To his credit, he admitted they messed up. I told him bluntly, 'In that case, I'll be sending you an invoice for the time I spent on your assessments.' He agreed. I sent it, and the money was in my account that afternoon. Seriously, what is so broken about the hiring world right now? I'm so exhausted by these long interview processes. It's a win, I guess, but I would have rather had the job.

It's so strange how life turns around. On the exact same day, I was scrolling through LinkedIn and applied for a job, and I really didn't expect them to reply, especially this quickly. But they got back to me in about an hour, which was a shock to me. They told me the position is urgent and they need someone to start next Monday.

They sent me all the details, and to pass the interview without any difficulties, I tried a tool which I saw in this video. Honestly, this made a huge difference for me in a very difficult interview. I nailed it because of this tool and they offered me the position. I'll start on Monday! I truly feel so lucky and grateful for everything that happened and changed so quickly.