I applied for the position on the Red Ventures website on a Saturday and received an email from a recruiter on Monday. I did a phone screening with the recruiter a few days later. The phone screening with the recruiter was pretty standard stuff. We walked through my resume and she talked about their campus and benefits a lot. There were almost zero strategy or tactical questions—probably because as a recruiter the individual didn’t know a lot of super specific stuff about digital marketing. I like that the recruiter was transparent about the pay band (it started at $140k) on the first call. I was told by the recruiter I’d hear back shortly about whether they wanted to move forward. I got a generic rejection email with a line stating, “After much deliberation, we have decided not to move forward in the interview process with you at this time.” I sent the recruiter a thank you email and offered to do a homework assignment demonstrating that I could fit the strategy and tactical aspects of the role. The recruiter said they’d share that with the team and get back me. When I didn’t hear anything back from the recruiter after two days, I went ahead and did the homework assignment. I took one of the Red Venture brand websites and did a series of Google Tag Manager injections to pass new custom dimensions and metrics, as well as built out new global variables and granular event tracking. I took a website that literally only had a basic Google Analytics page view tag and completed revamped it. I sent the recruiter my homework assignment, complete with animated GIFs of the before and after analytics state, plus a detailed explanation of what I did and how it could be helpful for improving conversion rate and remarketing. The response? None, or crickets. After a month went by, I sent a follow-up email and again, nothing. Overall, that was pretty disappointing experience. To not even get a response after doing such detailed, free work was pretty insulting. Granted, they didn’t ask me to do that work, but the fact that it didn’t generate a follow-up email or call, or at least get me an interview with someone on the digital marketing team seems pretty ridiculous. I think there were two big problems at play. The first was the recruiter or screening process. For tactical and director level role, Red Ventures should have had either a digital marketing team member or more knowledgeable recruiter determining who gets further along. As I mentioned earlier, there were zero detailed digital marketing questions, so I’m not sure how you screen someone for a digital marketing role, particularly at the director level, like that. The second problem probably has to do with Red Ventures culture and staffing model. If you go on their website, they talk about culture a lot, but that in no way came across in the interview and the fact that the recruiter blew me off. I think they believe culture is having a hip, cool campus and pretending they’re the Facebook or Google of the Carolinas. Yes, they have great pay and benefits, but culture is about walking the talk, not merely saying things like look good on the careers section of your website. If you do any digging, you’ll notice that their staffing model seems to be based around hiring people directly out of college or with less than 3 years of working experience and giving them very elevated titles and pay. Why do I think I can confidently say that? A couple reasons. On the education portion of their online job application, there isn’t even a box to say when you graduated school. It simply says, “Expected graduation date.” Few positions list X number of years of work experience required. In fact, few positions list particular tactical or technical skills as being required. If you scan LinkedIn profiles for people that work there, you’ll see many have pretty high manager or director-level titles yet have four or less years of work experience and list next-to-no KPI, metrics or achievements. It’s literally things like hired directly out of school, worked there at Red Ventures for two to three years and went from associate (entry level) to senior manager or director. I think at the end of the day the reason I may have not got any further in the interview process is I have too much experience and demonstrated too much technical expertise for the position. I have over eight years’ experience in digital marketing, multiple, relevant certifications and the numbers to back up the claims on my resume and LinkedIn profile whereas I didn’t see anything similar when I looked at other, current Red Ventures employees I would have been working with or that had similar titles. It would be nice if Red Ventures was more straightforward and honest in its hiring and staffing model. Just tell people, “Look, we tend to hire new college graduates and would rather cycle through those types of employees instead of hiring people with the relevant work experience.”