Started with a short phone call with the recruiter. He was late and was walking to work so didn’t have my resume or any notes in front of him. That lasted about 15 minutes. Second step was a 30-minute call with the hiring manager. We had some technical difficulties with his phone, but overall it was a standard review of my background and experience. He ended the call by saying the recruiter would be back in touch with next steps. I never heard a single word from Vestmark after that. I waited a week and then emailed the recruiter to check-in. No response. It’s extremely unprofessional and disrespectful to ghost a candidate after they’ve invested the time for two interviews for you. Certainly left a bad taste in my mouth and makes me glad I won’t be working for this company.

I was contacted by their recruiter for a phone screening, then a week and half later I was contacted again by the recruiter to schedule a phonecall with their senior product architect and then an onsite interview. I read some of the reviews about peoples interview process and was skeptical on my visit. I found the interview reviews to be incredibly helpful in terms of what I should expect and it went similarly to what others fed back. I met with 4 different individuals. My first meeting was with a product manager, he started out by asking me about my past experience in the financial industries. The focus of his questions were around functionality in the system, and I saw this as a way for him to question my technical acumen. Within the first five minutes of meeting with him, he literally said "the role is yours, if you choose to accept it." This of course made me even more skeptical as I had never heard of anyone offer me a role so quickly, I thought "is this guy trying to put my defenses down?" He kept asking about functionality instead of questions about my experience and would stop me to elaborate on technical details. It felt very obvious to me that he was seeking insights for inspiration on functional improvements. Towards the end of my meeting he asked me one question about how I would develop a user story for a business requirement I told him I created and executed on for one of my internal constituents. The third meeting was with (2) Senior business analyst, which also called themselves product owners (another sign of fake SCRUM, miscontrued role assignments). The two analyst I spoke to were kind and legitimately interested in my work experience. They did not focus on the technical aspect of functionality and instead asked direct questions about my past work experience. When I first met with them, I was now very skeptical of my motivation to work for this company, but after speaking with the two analyst I found them to be authentic and I eased up. The final round was with another product architect. He asked me questions about old technology I used again, I mentioned I worked with Unix in my first role within financial services 9 years ago and he made it a point to try and correct me about the reference name for 'shell scripting' when I could not recall what kind of specific scripting I had done. The interview was focused around technical specifics in previous software I worked with. I had to remind him that my most recent work experience was more applicable to the role as it was recent and I could recall on it more than the work I had performed 4 years earlier on a similar platform. He realized I was skeptical and kept his questions more relevant to my recent work. After my conversation with him, he walked me to the front desk and I was signed out. Overall, I left the office (not impressive office space at all, they work in cubicles which is a strange concept for a product development team) with strange feelings about what I had just been through. I received a call the following week with "feedback" from the recruiter that they had not decided to move forward with me because I did not have enough agile experience. When I told him that this was clearly visible in my resume, he said that they needed to bring me in for more questioning. My thoughts are that if this was the actual issue, why wasn't I questioned more on this over the phone screening. Why was the same feedback given from two sources who did not ask many questions at all about my work within the agile framework. A firm that does not follow agile SCRUM was concerned about my agile experience, it was less than a pleasant experience.