- 30 min screening interview with HR rep
- 30 min screening interview with Programme Manager
- day of on-site interviews with various people (never got to this stage)
Despite being acquired by Google, you can see that the company is relatively young and is changing very rapidly. For example, by the time the scheduled interview with the Programme Manager arrived (i.e. 3 weeks later), what the HR rep had told me was already out-of-date and it reflected badly on me. While technically, the inner workings of the company and how it is organised is not public knowledge, and therefore shouldn't be expected of candidates, the interviewers nonetheless see it as a sign of lack of preparation.
Also, it takes a long time to schedule interviews because everyone is constantly off-site. So plan for your process to take a while.
Lastly, I had a particularly horrible experience with the programme manager, who was an hour late for our scheduled Google Hangouts and didn't bother letting me know. I had to follow-up with multiple HR coordinators to see if she was still planning on signing-in, only to have the time pushed and then pushed again - even then, she was still 40 minutes late! On this, perhaps the only actionable word of advice to other potential candidates is: if you can schedule your interview for the morning, before the daily grind manages to wear down the interviewers, do it. My interview was obviously the first one in a very long night of interviews. I know this to be true because A) she was an hour late, and B) she explicitly told me she was already "very stressed today" and asked to reschedule. She also kept telling me my Google Hangout settings were off because she couldn't hear me...we fidgeted around for 5-10 minutes (of the 20 minutes I had left in my scheduled time because she arrived so late) only to discover that it was her settings that had been muted. After all of that, I had been waiting for an hour and we only really had 10-15 minutes left of what was supposed to be a 45 minute interview.
I can't help but wonder if I had agreed to reschedule, would I have encountered a different set of circumstances? Circumstances which were friendlier and perhaps more primed for a positive interaction, rather than one that was doomed to go badly from the start? This sort of variation surely doesn't make for a very good gauge of candidates' capabilities