About 3-4 weeks after applying, I get a call to setup a phone interview... on the date of the phone interview I take off work, have everything prepped and ready, and no call. Over a HALF HOUR later the phone rings with someone else from the HR office (not the interviewer) wanting to re-schedule, with some vague excuse. Let me stop right here and point out how if I had done that, the interview process would be over. Which would've actually done me a favor, as you'll find out. But back to the process: phone interview finally takes place with the original interviewer, who is a junior HR jockey - barely 6 months on the job. Curiously, this was after she had worked in HEB store operations. Why one would be reduced to HR from a higher level position is a question with potentially alarming answers, but we were there to talk about me, not her. After introductions and the usual niceties, she started reading off her interview question sheet. However, she didn't seem that interested in my answers, though I had carefully crafted great answers & rehearsed and practiced my delivery for 2 weeks, and had correctly anticipated the majority of her questions. But, after a nice, detailed answer with all the important things mentioned, I simply received an "uh huh. ok." response - no positive emotion or interest. Roughly two weeks later, I received another call from the same junior HR lackey - unsurprisingly, they are "moving forward with other candidates who have more experience." I ask about the interview, how I might improve or if there was anything I that was a problem - she said there wasn't. So, you're telling me that I'm being disqualified from consideration because of something you already knew before the interview? I guess she wasn't used to logic-based problem solving, because all I heard in response to that was another vague answer that sure sounded like an excuse. Or I was just being straight up lied to about my interview performance. Unsettling either way. The simple truth is that while the program description doesn't have a desired experience component listed, the "recruiters" (a term HR lackeys have no business using) will always take experience over anything else. Doesn't matter if you have demonstrated leadership and initiative in starting your own business that's very customer-focused, earned a graduate degree, and are not fresh out of college - unless you have what the "recruiter" would call "relevant experience", you're wasting your time applying. In response to what in retrospect was a tremendous waste of my time, I will now ensure that the HR flunkies will need to come up with new questions, wasting their time.

The phone interview felt very impersonal. No rapport building on the part of the recruiter. Most of the questions are leadership-related. I was surprised so many leadership behavioral questions were asked in a first interview/phone screen with a recruiter.