Was contacted by a Verkada recruiter and we set up a phone screen. We then moved onto a 1:1 video call with one of the team members, who said they were interested and wanted to move forward. I was asked to choose between two different take-home project prompts, and one of the hiring managers asked me to provide samples of content I'd written in the past.
After turning in my project, I was then asked to do an onsite interview at Verkada's office in San Mateo. I interviewed with four different members of the team.
In advance of the onsite, I was provided with the names and LinkedIn pages of the people I'd be interviewing with. It quickly became apparent, as I dug deeper into who else was on the team, that Verkada is deeply biased in favor of Ivy League graduates. I could only find two members of this sizable Marketing organization that weren't Ivy Leaguers. That was a pretty big red flag.
My education was brought up twice during the interviews, which baffled me given that I'm long since removed from college, including where I went to school and what I studied. I was also asked a lot of odd questions that were irrelevant to either what I'd be doing in this role or what I'd done in previous roles, but also didn't have much to do with my personality or thinking style. It was very much an exercise in sizing up my pedigree. The air was thick with elitism and a number of thinly-veiled comments made partway through by one of the interviewers so obviously screamed "You're not getting hired" that it would've been better if they'd just said it and gotten it over with.
I also came away with the impression that the interviewers were definitely not aligned on what they want the person in this role to focus on upon starting, which means they really don't know what they want from this role — and that's a waste of everyone's time.
I was taken on a tour of the building, which is beautiful, and had all the shiny perks shown off to me, but the overall vibe was definitely very frat-meets-sorority in almost every team we walked past other than the engineers. As I left the building after the interview, a group of girls walked out behind me and one of them loudly said, "Excuse me, there's a sticker in your hair," which the others started gleefully giggling about. I pulled it off and turned it towards her and said, "Oh, yeah," showing her it was my visitor badge. She seemed utterly shocked that I was interviewing there and they quickly stopped laughing, but it didn't give a good impression at all of the types of personalities Verkada prioritizes hiring here.
Verkada also insists on having everyone work in the office. They claim it's to help promote speed of innovation, which is very debatable and seems like a backwards mindset as companies continue to provide hybrid or remote opportunities. They attempted to justify the work-from-office policy multiple times during the onsite even though I never brought it up myself during the interviews. I lost count of how many times the in-office barista was used as a selling point during the interview process.
I grew suspicious of how generous Verkada claimed they could be. When I expressed concerns about my commute during the initial phone screen, the recruiter claimed buying a candidate a car was an option. That's ridiculous, but especially during a recession, and frankly reckless and bizarre. Why not just, you know, not shell out tens of thousands of dollars and instead allow people to work from home? Offer a hybrid work model? Yet, one of the hiring managers again mentioned it as a possibility when I was asked how I got to the office.
I was ultimately not offered the role, but it's ok because many things felt extremely off about this company and the team. Catered lunches, baristas, advanced tech, and lots of glass can't cover up a culture that seems rife with elitism, Mean Girls juvenility, dysfunction, and lack of alignment which come out when the right questions are asked and you get a peek behind the curtain.
Remember, Verkada: we're interviewing you as much as you're interviewing us.