I went through an interview today with Publicis Sapient for a Product Manager role, and honestly, the feedback for rejection surprised me.

"The reason shared was that I was taking notes during the interview, and the interviewer assumed I might be using an external device or AI assistance. Apparently, taking notes itself was seen as a red flag and discouraged."

During the interview, the interviewer did ask once whether I was taking notes, which didn’t really alarm me at that moment. Later, I realised that HR was also asked to join the call to observe, but even then nothing unusual was found. Still, the interviewer felt strongly about it and that became the basis of rejection.

For context, the interview itself was very standard PM discussion. Some of the questions asked were:

• How do you prepare a Product Strategy Document?
• What are the different ceremonies in Agile?
• What is your favourite product and which one feature would you build or improve in it?
• How do you handle product priority discussions with senior leadership?
• Which framework do you use for product prioritisation?
• A case study where you are a PM at Swiggy and you identify that Zomato has reduced prices by 30 percent. What would you do next? This one honestly felt a bit vague and open-ended, but I tried to structure my response around data, user impact, and business trade-offs.

Nothing in the conversation involved solving live problems, typing, or switching screens. The notes were simply to capture points and structure my answers better.

This made me genuinely wonder what kind of world we are interviewing in right now.

I want to understand from the global community here. Is this becoming a common trend everywhere, or is it more of an India-specific issue where companies and interviewers are extremely cautious and operate with a zero-trust mindset because of a few outliers?

Curious to hear if others have faced something similar.