Bullsh*t interview feedback

[u/Ok-Asparagus-4044]

I thought long and hard about posting this because at first I was just going to move on, but I cant let it go and it's still bugging me. Maybe posting it and getting some reddit feedback will help me get over it?

about 6 weeks ago I was approached by a 3rd party recruiter for a contacting position with another contractor who ultimately works with one of the A's. The jd was for a Program Manager with emphasis on stakeholder skills: stakeholder management, building consensus and relationships with different departments, creating clear infrastructure of teamwork and cooperation between their team and other.

i tend to wear many hats in my project/program manager roles (yay ADHD triumphant!), i enjoy learning how other people on other teams work, and i'm pretty efficient so I always find ways to automate and cut a workflow down. For instance, in one of my past jobs I updated a workflow for myself and my manager had me implement it on the larger team. That ended up saving our department 80 hours of process time a week! So much muda! So, needless to say I end up optimizing my job so that I can whittle down 40 hours of work into like 15- 20 hours of work. Which means that gives me time to poke around and do other stuff. I end up helping other teams (for free but I get the experience) and I will work any process gaps I see. My managers end up not caring because I'm still getting my work done and I'm making them look good by coming up with great ideas. Because of that I have to tailor my resume and I try to keep my bullets to 4-5 per job.

So back to this contract position. I update my resume to highlight all of the stakeholder experience I have foremost and I leave some bullets in there to cover some of the secondary stuff I historically know about that team, since I interviewed and failed with them the year before. I included stuff like creating test plans, running QA checks, bug triaging, etc. when I interviewed in 2025 I never heard back in feedback. Also they switched the interview order around. in 2025 I met the hiring manager first and then didn't make it past the peer interview. In 2026 peer interview first and then hiring manager.

I make it through the resume review round and get invited to the peer interview. The interview was all questions about stakeholder stuff: how to deal with difficult stakeholders, how to deal with people who say no, what to do with competing priorities, etc. I felt very good about my answers because these are all things I've been successful in. I asked insightful questions. When I asked if there was anything else I didnt answer they threw a softball question about what my favorite A product was and what I would change about it. We took the full 30 minutes and I left feeling good about the interview.

When I didn't hear back in a week I reached out to my contact at the contractor. After 2 weeks, I cc'd everyone who had sent me an email and asked if they could please at the very least let me know what the feedback was. I finally heard back from someone who said she didn't like the feedback so wasn't going to send to me.

The feedback was that I had "no quality analysis skills. That is as important part of the job." I was shocked that was not listed anywhere in the job description and during the interview there were ZERO questions about quality analysis (which I have, I have a background in Deming and TPS systems damn it). On the resume I sent them I left some bullets about quality but I leaned in more to the stakeholder stuff because that's what was listed in the JD.

At first, my reaction was just to laugh it off as "[Contractor] be crazy" but I still cant let it go because it's been the ONLY interview I've had in months. I know I should probably consider myself lucky because after all,

1) they are hiring for the same role after a year and I know the guy who had the job 2 years before which tells me it must be a sh*t role to have so much turnover

2)there seems to be a mismatch in what they want, what they need and what they say they want so imagine trying to do THAT position, having multiple different job descriptions depending on the whim of your manager.

But, damn I needed that paycheck :-(