I applied online. They sent me an email with the links to several online assessments that took me about two hours to complete. I have no problem with pre-interview assessments. However, some of the questions are definitely not applicable to an English-speaking candidate for a CFO role. For example, I was asked in which country a certain longitude and latitude combination was located. I simply googled the answer. Despite being from the U.S. and obviously a native English speaker, I was asked to do both a verbal and a written assessment to test my English language skills. This can actually be challenging with the people writing the questions are not native English speakers and make grammatical errors in the questions that they ask. After the online assessments, I had a 30-minute Skype interview with an internal recruiter. She was very pleasant and was clearly working from a script. After the Skype interview, she sent me a link to a common behavioral assessment that took about 10 minutes to complete. This is normal in an interview process. The next step was both an Excel and a Word assessment. The Excel assessment consisted of two exercises. The first one was a test of skills in working with pivot tables. The second was a test of how to create formulas to answer various questions. The second exercise had ambiguous information that could result in multiple answers to their questions. The company allotted one hour to complete the Excel assessment. The Word exercise was about proofreading and attention to detail. It consisted of a few short paragraphs and a table about soccer in South America. The goal was to find between five and 10 errors, identify them as high, medium, or low and then prioritize them in importance to the document. The company allotted 25 minutes to complete this assessment. If they're really looking for a CFO to lead the company through an IPO by 2024 (as was said by the recruiter in the Skype interview), the Excel and Word assessments are inappropriate. The skills that they should be looking for have nothing to do with manipulating Excel and how well someone proofreads a document written in English by people whose English language skills may not be the best. Even in a medium-size company like BairesDev which has annual revenue of near $100 million according to public sources, the primary skills for hiring a CFO need to be focused on working with the internal leadership team, developing the finance organization, and building relationships with potential investors and lenders. They've been hiring for this position since February. They have continued to expand the number of U.S. markets in which they are posting the position. I don't believe that they really understand the skills necessary to be the CFO of a company of this size that is supposedly looking to go public. It seems like they're using the same testing process for this role that they use to hire software developers. While technical tests are extremely relevant for technical resources working in client-facing positions, they aren't relevant for the CFO role in a growing company of this size. If you are a candidate who has the right kind of experience for this role, I would think long and hard about participating in this process. The assessments for this role lead me to believe that they're really looking for more of a manger or director level person and calling it a CFO. It's not the assessment process that is a problem. It's the inability of BairesDev to adapt it to the different requirements of a truly senior position. If the company responds to this post, it will likely be the same kind of anodyne response that they often post that shows that they don't understand how to recruit senior finance professionals.

The interview procedure was very well explained at the beginning. The interviewer explained exactly what the steps and demands would be. With this, the interview proceeded normally. The interviewer also commented the next steps of the process.