I applied directly to the position on their website. Very shortly after I got a response from the hiring manager to hop on a phone interview. The conversation was relatively informal - he gave an overview of the company and responsibilities. Over the course of 2 months, I went through multiple rounds of interviews with a few other members of the team. They even flew me up there for me to present a 56 slide 360 audit of their onsite/onapp experience/lifecycle program + 90 day plan on how I was going to take them to the next level. After the presentation, they took turns interviewing me 1v1. They recently acquired lord and taylor and from all my conversations with them, seem to have no idea how they were going to navigate through the acquisition logistics in the coming year - almost to the point where I was beginning to wonder why they even wanted to hire someone in this CRM role if it would be so hard to move deliverables along because it's not as mission-critical initiative for execs
Long story short, the hiring manager asked me over email for the link to the presentation and I was ghosted by a company that I was passionate about after dedicating a lot of my time to them. They didn't even give me the decency to provide feedback on why I wasn’t selected. I essentially feel like they took my ideas and ran with it. Note to companies that like to ghost candidates: you're not just losing a candidate, you're losing a customer. The whole experience left a bad taste in my mouth.