Went through a very long and thorough interview process for the role. During the process I was disappointed by 2 things:
1) Poor Communication - A theme that you'll see in recent interview experiences is that candidates are increasingly left hanging, either never getting a call or having it be delayed by weeks. This happened to me. Was promised a response by a specific timeframe. I heard back an entire week and a half after, only after reaching out by email.
2) Sub-Par Respect for Interviewees Time - Despite putting in all of that effort, spending almost an entire day putting together a presentation from scratch and getting to the final round, I was constantly fighting an uphill battle with the people interviewing me as to whether I would find the role interesting or challenging. While I shared that I would I felt like I was working against pre-conceived notions that were established early in the process. Would have appreciated not moving forward earlier if that concern had manifested rather than getting to the end of the process to still hear that.
Overall, was disappointed with Zendesk's interview process and even more disappointed to see other reviewers run into similar issues.
4 rounds of interviews: 1 with HR, 1 with potential manager, one technical, and one mock presentation/conversation with customer. The first three were pretty run of the mill. Everyone I talked to was nice and seemed interested in me. However, the last round required about 3 hours of prep and required me to give a pretty technical solution to some business requirements in an industry I know little about. I unfortunately never had the displeasure of using Zendesk in a professional setting, and I guess that ended up being my downfall as I was hesitant to give concrete solutions to business requirements I didn't completely understand. I got a canned rejection email with no feedback on a Saturday morning, which was really a spit on my face.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
You are a Technical Architect tasked with providing technical guidance and implementation
strategy to a new Zendesk customer, Acme Co., who will be launching their customer service
efforts on the Zendesk platform and will be using both Zendesk Support and Guide. Acme is a
business-to-consumer organization that provides goods and services to its customers.
Acme maintains a customer database that contains important information about each customer.
It is important for Acme agents and operations to view this customer information while handling
customer service requests. The customer-service leadership team at Acme is looking to
Zendesk to provide consultation around the available options, considerations, pros and cons,
best practices, and any other important implementation design criteria in order to understand
the optimal approach for integrating their customer database with Zendesk.
As a technical architect, provide Acme with the following three options to meet their needs:
● Data Import & Synchronization
● Single Sign-On
● Custom Lookup App
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Zendesk in Nov 2017
Interview
Started with a HR interview, followed by direct manager interview and then a case study presentation.
During the case study presentation it was observed skills to CEO level presentation, knowledge about enterprise level deal making and brand positioning and arguing.
After getting a proposal all the screening and background check was performed.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
It was more like a walk-trough my past experiences