REI Program Manager interview questions

Applied for a remote position. Hiring manager asked me multiple times if I was fine with coming in for “1:1s and whiteboarding”. Really strange bait-and-switch, since the team members I spoke with weren’t even close to HQ and REI is “remote-first”. Following the interview, radio silence for a month until the recruiter confused me for another candidate. Can’t say that’s something I’ve ever heard of.

Applied online and about a week later, I was asked to do a HireVue screening. After that I had an interview with a recruiter, followed by several other interviews across the span of a several weeks with different people on the team, in HR and marketing. The last interview was with the hiring manager. I had turned down another interview so that I could attend this one and spent several hours preparing myself. The hiring manager asked me one question, and then told me everyone had loved connecting with me. She then she told me she wasn’t going to offer me the position but that there might be a contract role on a different team that I might be considered for...... in a few months. She said it would be like an extended interview, so after 9+ interviews and several weeks later, they wanted to offer me a maybe position to test out my qualifications some more? I wish they would have told me this over an email so that I wouldn’t have missed out on the other opportunity. At the very least, now I know to avoid applying for REI positions in the future.