At the VP of Growth stage, the interview raised concerns around leadership and evaluation quality. The session lacked depth and direction, and didn’t reflect the level of rigour expected for a senior hire. Questions stayed at a surface level and didn’t evolve based on responses, which limited any meaningful discussion. There was little evidence of a structured assessment approach, and it often felt unclear how experience or expertise was being evaluated. For a role of this level, I would expect a more deliberate and well-executed interview, led by someone able to challenge, probe, and build on answers. That wasn’t the case here. As a result, the feedback provided afterwards didn’t feel credible or well-founded, given the nature of the conversation.

I had my technical interview with the VP of Growth, and for something positioned as a deep dive into technical SEO and AI visibility, there wasn’t a single question on AI or visibility. This wasn’t a technical deep dive. He didn’t cover crawling, indexing, or Core Web Vitals, and didn’t ask what makes a page rank highly today. There were no questions around my strategy or what drives commercial content and revenue. Even setting up the interview was difficult, with multiple reschedules and cancellations, which didn’t reflect well on the business. During the interview, he was taking notes manually, repeatedly asking the same questions and pausing the conversation, which disrupted the flow and made it hard to stay focused. By the end, I didn’t feel confident about moving forward or working with him. Despite that, I later received feedback saying I wasn’t “deep enough” in my technical responses — but based on what was actually asked, it’s unclear how that was assessed.