Contacted by a recruiter, I was then introduced to Cloetta. The hiring manager doesn’t have deep knowledge of the FMCG business and it shows through his questions. Quite opinionated, he is hiring for capex and project management leadership roles without having a proper technical background to evaluate candidates, their motivations and experience. An example? He says that he was implementing TPM with a former employer, but then ask you what TPM is and if it is only “reactive maintenance” (enough said). He talks about working through different countries and cultures when he never left UK and live/worked abroad. He doesn’t dig deep into your technical competencies, management style or else related to the job, probably to avoid making “faux pas”. He asks questions unrelated with the position just for the sake of it, not to get bored and to differentiate your interview from the many others already scheduled in his two days of intense back-to-back interviews with candidates. In the end you're just a name on a piece of paper. He asks questions just to put you out of your comfort zone and see your reaction: mind games one would never assume to take place for an engineering leadership role at this level. The classic type of manager afraid of hiring someone with better experience, better knowledge, better anything.
