ESPN Interview Questions & Reviews

Interview Details The interview questions were reasonable and straight forward, but the Sports Assessment test was more challenging that I had anticipated because of the time limit that the system imposes upon the interviewee. Although I thought I had a reasonable amount of sports knowledge, I learned that there is much more to follow if I want to work as a statistics analyst.

Interview Details I was supposed to get called for an interview but that never happened and i was really confused about that.

Interview Details I had to answer many sport questions.
After I passed the test, I had a one on one interview with a recruiter about the job. He told me no job was available at first. After a one or two months later, I was given the opportunity to have an interview for the stats and info position. I had two phone interviews that was supposed to last around 30 minutes each. The interviewers do not make the decision. After 2 months later, I got the call that I was rejected.

Interview Details First got contacted by HR, got through because I knew somebody that works at ESPN. A week later, I got a second phone call from someone in ESPN Production. The Interview lasted around forty minutes. I felt confident throughout the entire phone call answering questions, but I did mess up on some of the sports questions he asked at the end.

Interview Details I did not get to the interview process. The recruiter insisted that I would have to reveal my salary history prior to moving forward in the process. My personal policy is never to do this, and almost all recruiters eventually respect this. From this recruiter, I got this load of bull:

"...I discussed our conversation with my superiors. Unfortunately in order to proceed I would at least need your salary history. The rationale is that we need to be sure we are placing people who fit appropriately with the how the other members of the team are compensated, that we will be able to give appropriate raises and that we will be able to retain talent for an extended period. From a recruitment perspective we are generally trying to push the needle up for salaries so we can get the best talent in the door."

Interview Details Applied through company website, received an email the following morning to set up a phone interview. When the recruiter called, it was not the same person I had been corresponding with via email and she never mentioned her name..so I had no way of sending her a thank you email following the phone interview. Phone interview lasted about 13 minutes, standard questions.

Interview Details 1st round - 1 telephone interview with HR and 1 with hiring manager
2nd round - excel test in office
3rd round - meet more members of the team including hiring manager again, director, senior vice president and other analysts

everyone was really friendly and really there is nothing to be fearful about

Interview Details The one-hour timed test was a crunch but enjoyable. The phone interview which followed was very focused on one-sport, in my case baseball. Not being a baseball enthusiast, I found this difficult

Interview Details I recently did a flyout to visit ESPN to interview for a role as a mobile software engineer, so I'll offer a few points about my experience there that might help folks in a general sense, as well as some points for those interviewing for software engineer roles in a specific sense.

The first thing was that the interviewing process took at least a month or maybe closer to two months. This may have been because of the holidays (before & after Thanksgiving & Christmas) or it might have been because this ESPN group wasn't super urgent on making decisions. I did manage to pass all the various phone screens and phone conversations (the technical questions and "getting to know you" calls with the higher ups). It was at that point the H.R. drone arranged for me to do the trip.

ESPN appears to be somewhat strict with how they do fly-outs: travel to & from your home airport is not reimbursed (i.e. if you have to take a taxi, you must pay for that out of pocket). They also will not cover GPS charges for the rental car, but printed-out Google map directions almost worked perfectly (see note in next paragraph). They only pay for two meals & one night's hotel, so if you want to see a bit of the area, you'll have to pay for the second night yourself. The hotel they put me up at, the Clarion, was under severe renovation and was not a good night's sleep… but after March of 2013, the hotel will be re-flagged as a DoubleTree by Hilton and should be somewhat more comfortable.

Regarding the campus, it's an impressive collection of buildings surrounded by an iron fence. Now here is where you need to be a bit careful in your driving: if you follow Google's directions (or even the BING instructions that your H.R. resource sends you), it will send you to a closed gate (which used to be a public street named "Birch"). You'll find an open gate between the former "Birch" street and Middle Street but it's also the wrong entrance. Instead of that "North" gate, you actually want to go in the "South" gate… which you can reach by going a little further south on Middle Street and then turning left on West street. And this is where you'll find Building 9, which is the security building where all candidates check in.

Speaking of security, I've never seen tighter or more visible security in any other corporate installation. You must show your ID to get past the South gate, then again when you end up in Building 9 to get your "visitor" sticker. Lastly, you'll park your car and get driven in a security van to where your interview will be and your first interviewer will be waiting for you in the lobby. If you'd like to use the Internet while on campus (e.g. if you want to demonstrate something you've done that requires remote server access, or show off apps that live on a non-ESPN website), you must ask the hiring manager to issue you a temporary password which will get you onto the guest WiFi network.

One thing that irritated me significantly was the H.R. person insisted that I wear a business suit to the engineering interview. I tend to "dress nicely" for West Coast interviews (because suits are far too formal for waving my arms while doing technical explanations in front of a well worn white board) and I also "dress better" for East Coast interviews. For ESPN, I ended up buying an expensive brand new suit. When I showed up on-site, nobody was dressed more formal than cargo or khaki pants, t-shirts and sweatshirts (multiple layers for variable indoor & outdoor weather, etc.) and I ended up being quite uncomfortable -- and feeling quite overdressed -- while trying to explain myself & my background. It's still probably a safe bet to wear a suit if your interview is NOT for an engineering role.

I probably shouldn't have to remind you, but even if you're interviewing for an engineering role, try to get as familiar as you can with the products you might end up working with. Another important thing is to try to drop as many sports-related anecdotes as possible. If you can admit to being a sports nut and it sounds credible, that's likely to be a big plus.

Another thing that made me uncomfortable was the age difference between me (I'm early 40's) and the engineering team, the oldest of them might have been 34 or 35. Some of the guys I spoke with have only been with ESPN since getting out of school years ago, which is almost unheard of in the computer science world (which usually has more frequent job jumping); but then again, the benefits at ESPN are indeed quite impressive (ESPN is the only company I've heard of that actually continues to offer pensions).

In any event, I was glad to get to visit ESPN and I hope my experience flunking the interview will help you to prepare and pass yours. If my interview notes helped you out, please let me know by voting "yes" on the "Helpful?" question below.