She was working in customer service and applied for an HR support role — answering employees’ questions about activating accounts, payslips, schedules. The same conversations, aimed inward instead of outward.
The interviewer asked how many phone calls she handled a day. She began to explain that her current team handled customer contacts through email and live chat. Before she could finish the sentence, the interviewer said, oh, okay then, in a tone that ended the subject.
Later she asked how the HR team communicated. About seventy per cent, she was told, went through email and tickets; the remaining thirty per cent was phone calls or people stopping by a desk. The call volume had never been the point. The exact-match version of her job had been.
She had more examples. The pattern, as she described it, is a hiring manager who treats a different job as an insult rather than adjacent experience — and then leaves the role open for months, because the only person who already does that job is someone they would have to hire internally. Which, for the lowest-level roles, they do not do.
She wrote that interviewing was making her question why anyone bothers.