Team seems nice and well-meaning, but the interview process was clunky and disorganized mainly due to the following:
- During the second interview portion, there's a project/work sample that made absolutely no sense. I even had a few folks look it over and they were as confused as I was. It's kind of a hybrid of a QBR and a sales call, indicating a lack of understanding as to what CSMs do.
I'd recommend using a simple onboard/CS intro call for this project in future to demonstrate product knowledge and get a sense of the candidate's organizational/people skills.
- Due to the format of this exercise, it was presented as a 15-minute deck. I mentioned I'd normally loop the client into the conversation for a QBR and asked if they'd prefer I wait until the FAQ section to bring them into the conversation. They said yes, then interrupted me the whole time and it was awkward for everyone.
- Emphasis was less on the product knowledge that I'd spent a lot of time studying and more on the specific data presented on mock slides. Again, strange given I have no basis to analyze this data and wasn't even aware it was going to be used as more than a roleplay type of thing. It also seems a bit cart before the horse to want an in-depth analysis of trends and mock-client specific challenges before you've even worked at a company. I think the general expectation is that candidates are taking time to learn the product. There's also no resources or knowledge base to draw from for the hyper specific questions asked. Overall, just felt like a chaos interview. Didn't help that the vibe was fairly disengaged the minute I joined the call.
- Despite this, I somehow made it to the final round which was a chill peer interview concluding with that I should expect to hear back from so-and-so in HR for next steps. I did not, in fact, hear from so-and-so, but I did get a generic rejection after that.
Feedback after the final round and/or on projects (extra confusing because I assumed I passed the project step) is just good manners and respectful to candidates.
Not quite sure how to rate this since, again, they seemed nice enough, but looking at it purely from a process standpoint, definitely room for improvement. Not quite "difficult" in the traditional sense but a kind of feral in their approach. It gave the impression that no one is quite sure what they're doing and perhaps not quite sure what a CSM does either.