My interview experience was such a turnoff that I made a concerted effort to remove Wayfair from my job alerts. Let me premise that I truly believed this company was a perfect match, both from a skills and cultural perspective. I’ve applied for various design roles within the company. My angst is that I am a seasoned professional, and I came out of the interview feeling like an idiot. The process started with many upbeat and energizing conversations, yet it ended on a sour note. My fifth interview went like this: Interviewer: “Let’s say you have a call center where employees make $15 hour, and they take 3 calls per hour. You’re replacing this with homegrown software and the engineers that are building it make $60hr and it will take a team of 4 engineers at 50 hours per week for 5 weeks to replace the software/processes. What’s the ROI? And no, you can’t use a calculator.
As a hiring manager myself, I find this question unrealistic. Does it challenge my ability to perform under pressure? Sure, and it’s not rocket science to figure it out, but in a realistic situation, any smart person would gather the details they need, do an analysis, and get back with them on the answer. This response didn’t fly with this person. He wanted a longhand calculation…let’s remember, I am a *design* candidate! So I ballparked my response based on past experience. The interviewer showed a look of repulse, and responded, “never mind, let’s move on.” This shows how green (lacking experience) their employees are, and sadly, this last interview was such a turnoff that I removed this company from my alerts job postings and have decided to look elsewhere for buying home goods. I think I made the right decision unless someone can prove me wrong. I believed in their values…from relentless customer focus to delivering results with agility…not so much now. It’s sad because I really thought this company and its work efforts were the perfect match for me.