She was the final candidate standing after nearly two months and seven rounds: recruiter screen, technical assessment, case study, a presentation to the board, and a final HR meeting. Every step, positive signals. Every interviewer, enthusiastic. She allowed herself to believe.
Then the rejection arrived. A form email. No feedback. No phone call. No acknowledgement that she had invested weeks of unpaid work into a case study they would keep. Days later, the same role reappeared on the company careers page.
"I actually threw up," she wrote on r/recruitinghell. The post drew thousands of sympathetic comments, many sharing their own versions of the same story: a company that collects free consulting through interview stages, selects no one, and reposts the listing as if the whole thing never happened. One commenter noted they had tracked a single company reposting the same senior role every week for four months.
Seven rounds to nowhere. The position is somehow still open.