Took awhile for them to get back to me after applying to the job considering I applied in 3 different ways: from seeing it on their website, sending my info to an employee I met at their Lean Product meet up (we were encouraged to talk to Medallians about jobs after the talk), and then from seeing a posting on LinkedIn.
The call with their internal recruiter was fine, nothing challenging. I think he asked what I knew about Medallia and why I wanted to work there, what I did at my past positions, etc- the standard fare. I was asked to come in for an interview and to bring past work samples. So I took some time to gain access to my old documents and put together a short slide deck to show these things.
A few days before the interview was to take place, they contacted me saying they needed to reschedule. They were still pretty flexible and accommodating for my time though, so it didn’t end up being a big deal.
When I got there on the day of the interview, I was around 15 min early, so the person who had been coordinating my interview over email met me and gave me a tour of the office. It’s a very cool space, so that was fun to see in full. The tour stopped at the room where I was going to have my interview and soon enough the person I was to meet with came in. I had been told the person’s name, but I didn’t know he was the hiring manager until I had to ask in the interview/it became more obvious with the questions he was asking. It would’ve been nice to know this ahead of time in terms of questions I may have prepped.
The hiring manager had an interview style that I’ve run into before and that I find pretty annoying. He painted a scenario of a product the company was building for such and such customer(s) and asked how I’d go about certain things like planning, approaching a task, etc. However, after I answered, it was clear that he was looking for a different reply from me so just kept repeating the question as if he wanted me to give a different answer. I did my best to explore a range of possibilities/answers and my decision behind them, but inevitably he answered his own question with his preferred/the “right” answer at the end after I didn’t give him what he wanted.
There was also a logic-type question thrown in about adding up the #s of the hours on a clock- adding 1-12. Then taking this # (the sum of 1-12) and drawing 6 lines between the #s to get the same #. It’s not that hard of a puzzle to solve, but describing/understanding it (as you can tell here) isn’t easy. It took awhile for me to understand what he was asking for, and of course I had an arithmetic error along the way, so it was a little unnerving. Plus, it seemed to take up a good chunk of time so he hardly had time/seemed interested in the slides I had taken awhile to put together in order to showcase highlights of my past work.
Toward the end of the interview, someone was lingering by the door of the conference room because they had the room next. We left the room and the only place the hiring manager could find to talk more was outside. They have areas set up for people to sit out there, but we ended up sitting on a random bench when it was hotter out and also just extremely bright. I was facing the sun and told the guy I couldn’t look up to see him because I was blinded. Things ended soon after finding our outdoor spot because his boss called him on his cell. He was in the middle of wrapping things up anyway, but the end was still kind of awkward given the outdoor part and him running off to see his boss/another meeting.
I wasn’t sure how the manager thought things went, but given his communication style and some things he exposed about current challenges they were having (over promising to customers/unable to meet deadlines) I wasn’t interested in continuing through the process. I heard back from the recruiter 6 days later saying they wanted me to come in again and this time there was an assignment to complete too. I told the recruiter I wasn’t interested because things didn’t click for me with the manager, and he asked if there was any specific feedback I had. It was too bad things didn’t go well along the way because the company & their product seems really cool.