They were applying for product and technical program manager roles, and — by their own account — getting a fairly decent response rate. The problem was how each process ended.
Four separate times they reached the hiring-manager interview, and four separate times the rejection came after it. Before that run it had been full-panel interviews that ended in rejection; now the wall had moved, and they were still hitting it.
None of the employers would give feedback. So they were left to reverse-engineer — from the outside, with no notes — what they had done wrong and what they might have said differently. They asked whether anyone else was stuck in the same place.
Reaching the hiring manager is supposed to be the narrowing of a field. Four times over, it was simply where the door closed, quietly, with no explanation offered.