After a phone screening with the recruiter, I flew down to Baltimore for an in-person interview with the hiring team (four of the five I met with via video conference). This was at the end of April. The following week the recruiter told me to send my references “ASAP” and that I should “expect an offer by the end of the week.” They checked my references, but no offer came. In fact, I never heard from them again. I recently sent the CEO a letter about this experience, saying “if you treated your customers the way you treated me, you’d be out of business,” which prompted a call from someone in talent acquisition who apologized and confessed that after my references were checked “the team decided to move in a different direction and not fill the role.” In other words, the job was FAKE. It continues to astonish me just how such horrible human beings came into existence, let alone got put in charge of hiring.