I applied on line sometime during the last week of July 2017 and was rejected almost within days. I understood their decision, since I was from a different chemical industry although the requirement for this position was very rudimentary. In fact anybody with a chemical engineering degree and experienced in running a process line would have made this first cut. I had a masters in Chem. Eng. but my bachelors was another branch of Eng. but related. But lo and behold, in about 3 to 4 weeks, I got a call from the position’s ‘hiring manager’ who went over my resume, my interests and other details at a pretty thorough level. We even spoke about one of my graduate school professors who happened to be known to the manager. At the end of the conversation I was told that they had some internal candidates to pass through first and would get back if they wanted to proceed further. Again, I did not expect much to happen. In about another two weeks I got a call from the manager saying that it would take more time for them to decide and I was free to look for other opportunities. It’s needless to say that I didn’t expect this call either. In another fortnight or so, I got a call from the same gentleman and an onsite interview got scheduled with few other persons (director and HR included) and groups along with a presentation from my side. I went there and presented some slides on what I was doing (process) then and what I did for my graduate thesis. But to my dismay I found that all the interviewers in unison attacked only one point. “That I was from a different industry from theirs”. Although I tried to convince that in these seven years I did have the opportunity to work in three distinct process operations and that it wasn’t at all difficult for me to pick up the strings at the new environment, but I felt they liked to stick to their point, nevertheless (may be they had a candidate selected already) Isn’t that strange? Everybody knew what was there on my resume and for God’s sake I had already spoken thrice with the departmental manager before my visit there, on the details of this position. Anyways, I sent out a thank you letter after the more than three hour interview thanking all of them by name and also expressed my gratitude for the lunch they provided. It has been almost eight weeks since my interviews (Sept. end), I haven’t heard back from Henkel in spite of follow up email and phone call to the manager with whom I spoke four times in total. Do we have a name for this sort of culture of not getting back to a candidate with the outcome of an interview in a professional engineering set up?

First, there is a phone interview with an HR person. Then, there's a virtual interview with Hiring Manager and Director of Engineering for the site. That's as far as I got, but I believe there is a panel interview after that. The Hiring Manager was fine, but the Director was really rude. It felt like he made up in his mind that I was exaggerating my experience and started nitpicking every little detail. He was also pompous and went on and on about how he used work at [insert prestigious company] and conduct interviews there.