I was invited to interview for a AML Transaction Monitoring Analyst. I have 3.5 years experience in KYC, which typically is considered very relevant or transferable experience. My interview began okay, despite the interviewer taking what I can only describe as a very stoic or ice cold approach. He was staring off into the distance, supposedly at my resume, but really never stopped to make eye contact at all. The interview questions were strange. Usually you are asked to answer questions in the STAR format, and give specific examples of difficult cases or difficult feedback and how you handled it. Instead, I was bluntly asked yes or no questions or overly open-ended questions (how much did you write in your KYC role?). What do you mean "how much"? The number of words? How many hours in a day? I was also asked to define words. "What is correspondent banking?" This felt more like the first question (the one that's kind of a freebie) on the ACAMS exam. How does defining basic terms allow me to stand out? We only had a half hour and a lot of it was spent on this. Additionally, the interviewer told him they were looking for 1 year transaction monitoring and SAR writing experience. This was not disclosed during the initial screening with the recruiter and was not on the job posting. If it had been, I would not have wasted his time or my time, because it was clear that the majority of my work was in KYC and that I'd only had 3 months direct AML experience. Of course I disagree with the interviewer that it's not transferable - yes KYC is only one of several subcategories of the bank's overall AML framework, but you can't have an AML program without a solid KYC foundation. It was a very strange interview and I left feeling like I was not given a fair shot.