I was approached through a recruiter for a position leading a production unit at Ascend. The job description closely matched what I had been doing for a few years, so I felt comfortable starting a discussion. My initial phone interview with the direct manager went well, going well over 90 minutes of productive discussion about both managerial and technical items. A few days later I was offered an on-site interview for a following Monday. Both the Ascend HR and my recruiter told me to expect a heavy dose of behavior-based / STAR questioning. The interview questions were heavily scripted, and most of the interviewers were potential senior peers. Some of the interviewers would break script and have a real discussion about the position, while others tried more of a hard-sell approach about the company. None of the questions were particularly difficult to answer. If you've been through STAR systems before, you know what to expect. Just about every interviewer asked about salary expectations. I picked up an odd vibe during a lot of the interviews that the questions were trending less towards the position for which I thought I was interviewing and more towards a purely technical role. I found out the next day that they had already decided I was too inexperienced for the role I was interviewing about, and that they were gauging my interest in a technical role. I was asked to have one more phone discussion with a hiring panel. That discussion went rather poorly as their HR rep would not accept my attempts to defer further salary discussion. I finally stated that I had made my salary expectations very well known in almost every 1-on-1 interview when I was on site, they had not changed, would not change with a different job description, and I was not going to discuss them further on a conference call. Turns out they wanted to offer me a job subordinate to the original position. After their classic bait-and-switch, I asked my recruiter to remove me from consideration before they extended any formal offer. They also never reimbursed my travel expenses.