I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Alteryx in Dec 2021
Interview
This was one of the most staggeringly uncomfortable experiences I've ever had in my career and even a week later I can hardly believe that this is the quality of interview companies think they can get away with in this current professional climate.
Recruiting coordinator emails me the morning of Black Friday -- already a red flag that you're expected to work the day after Thanksgiving -- and asks for my availability over the next few days. Okay, well, if I want to nitpick today is a holiday (or at the very least ought to be) and the next 2 days are the weekend so I'm assuming you mean the following week but I'm not going to be petty with semantics here so I'll give you my availability from Mon-Fri. Also if I *did* want to be petty, how about an acknowledgement that yesterday was a national holiday? Just a simple "Hope you had a Happy Thanksgiving," etc. but nope, just a cold, tersely-worded "You applied for this role. Are you available over the next few days?"
But I look past all that (and the fact that you're responding over a month after my application) and we schedule something for that week. The interview rolls around and I'm still reeling from how awkward it was days later.
We begin again with no polite exchange of pleasantries; just get down to brass tacks. The recruiter seems fidgety and nervous but reads as a recent graduate so I don't hold his awkwardness against him since he's probably had a rough time finding a job out of school just like the rest of his contemporaries. He takes a good 5 minutes of a 30-minute phone screener to read the job description verbatim, the same job description I applied to for this role so I'm already intimately familiar with.
The remaining time consists of the same format: the recruiter listing off each bullet point of the description followed by a request of how many years of experience I have with each of those things. The recruiter was very obviously selecting options from a drop-down and did not seem to want to tolerate any elaboration on my part. This made for a very clunky experience because the majority of attributes were either very similar, hard to quantify, or both.
For example, "How many years experience do you have interacting with teams? How many years experience do you have interacting with teams internationally? How many years experience do you have interacting with cross-functional teams?" These are all literally questions I'm being asked in that sequence with exactly no expectation that I respond with anything other than a discrete number. There are a lot of stories in those years! A lot of wisdom! You don't want to know *anything* about what I've learned from those years? How I've grown from those experiences? You really just want me to see "8-10 years" and move on to the next question? Why do we even need to be on the phone for this?
The call unfortunately concluded with one of the worst things that companies do, which is expect you to have experience with their specific suite of tools that they use, and they'll accept nothing else. Like, look, I've been doing this job for years. Program management tools are not that different. CRM tools are not that different. Unless the explicit job function is to evangelize that tool, it's something that can likely be learned in a matter of days by someone who has extensive industry and subject matter experience. Trust me: Jira is not that hard to learn! Atlassian is not that hard to learn! Tableau is not that hard to learn! The principles and nuances of program management take far longer!
I might be a little premature writing this given that they haven't reached out in the past week for next steps so I'm just assuming they're going to ghost me. It's just truly stunning to me that in an age when applicants have unprecedented power, some companies are still failing to adapt, thinking they can continue on with this cavalier approach to recruiting and expecting to get anyone promising or talented.
Bottom line is after this experience I want nothing to do with this company which is a shame because I live in commuting distance to its offices so I'd be qualified for remote, hybrid or on-site work. But everything about this experience portrays the image of a company that will not adapt in time to survive and that's not something I want to be around for.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Literally the list from the job description followed by "how many years experience do you have with that"? And I'm not paraphrasing.
Thank you for taking the time to leave this review. I'm sorry you had such a negative experience. We don't want any candidate to feel uncomfortable at any time in their process. I did want you to know that because of your feedback, we discussed this with the team directly so that they could learn from the experience.
Best,
Jill