Coming up on a year unemployed, they made it through seven rounds of interviews and assessments for a single company. It had been going well with HR and the team managers. It went sideways only at the last, in-person round, with the Head of Customer Success — who told them they were clearly experienced and knew their stuff, but that he would expect someone at their level to be using AI as part of the daily routine.
A few days later: the standard rejection email. Asked for detail, the reason was a lack of hands-on AI experience. They had no objection to using AI as a tool, they had said — they would simply verify everything before it reached a customer. Apparently that was not enough. Seven rounds for an answer that could have been given in the first.