For a company that claims to value “we are excellent to each other,” my experience was anything but. They advertised a bias-free and equitable hiring process yet what I encountered didn't reflect that. The interview process starts with a phone screen then multiple rounds with team members and a timed mock email exercise that must be completed in the interview. The mock email portion was strange. Most companies offer this as a take-home assignment but Backerkit’s approach felt more like a guessing game than a meaningful assessment of support skills. What made the whole process feel especially disingenuous was learning afterward that the person ultimately hired was closely related to the current Backer Support Specialist. If someone with insider knowledge is already in the running, it raises questions about how level the playing field really was. Having to take time off work to sit through hours of interviews when there’s likely a preferred referral is unfair. If Backerkit prefers to hire referrals, they should be upfront about it instead of presenting the process as fair and open. Other companies manage to be transparent about that, Backerkit could too. Overall, my experience showed a clear disconnect between what they claim to stand for and how it actually operates. I’m sharing this so others can go in with more realistic expectations.

I applied online and someone from Customer Success replied back saying that they were not hiring for the role at the time, but asked if they could reach out in the future if another role opened up. A few weeks after this, they replied saying that a position was opening up and asked if I was still interested in the role and BackerKit. I mentioned that I was still interested, and from here we had a phone screen, followed by an a three and a half hour site visit to speak with the head of Customer Success, a Backer Support Specialist, someone in HR, and one of the co-founders. The panel started off with the head of Customer Success, with them asking some standard interview questions, but as the panel went on, some of the questions asked by the Backer Support Specialist and co-founder just got super specific and threw me off a little, along with the overall vibe I got from the co-founder. I was also a tad uncomfortable first meeting the co-founder as they sat down in the interview room. As he asked his first question, which was "Tell me your life story, what have you been doing leading up to now?", he seemed a little hyper and kept sipping a bottle of tea every couple of seconds while looking very intensely at me, which to me was almost a little distracting. As the interaction continued, he talked more about the company history, and some of the different kinds of BackerKit creators that have come up, but also did talk a lot and at times went on and on and spoke for most of our time together. The final part of the interview was 30 minutes of working on fake customer support tickets. I had to finish as many as I could and the really challenging part about this was I was not allowed to check any kind of BackerKit resources and had to think entirely original replies to their very specific questions. A couple examples of these support tickets were: - I've gained weight since placing my t-shirt order and I've gone from a medium to a large. I've tried to edit this online, but it looks like I'm over the cutoff time to make any edits to the project. Is there any way you can change this on your end? - Can you let me know when I will be receiving my order?