Overall, I had a positive experience in interviewing at OwnLocal with the notable exception of meeting their CEO, which I will explain in more detail below. The people were overall very friendly and they do an excellent job of being transparent throughout the process as well as updating you quickly after each stage to let you know whether or not you will be moving forward.
The application process was in four stages:
1. After applying online, I was tasked with creating a website using their in house site creator www.sidengo.com. This was time consuming, as the site crashed multiple times while I attempted to build the site but was overall not particularly difficult. As well, this portion included the requirement to make a one minute video describing what OwnLocal does and why I should be hired there. These videos must be uploaded to youtube and thus examples for different positions are very easy to find as not all of them are unlisted.
2. The second portion was a video interview. It was done through a google hangout and included many of the 'classic' interview questions for this type of position. "Describe a difficult customer", "tell us about yourself", "What's one of your hobbies?", etc.
3. The third stage was a group interview with staff you would be working with. It took about one hour in a sort of popcorn style with different people asking a variety of different questions. The team seemed fairly causal, occasionally giving joking answers to some of my questions, and at times seemed more interested in just 'hanging out' than asking specific questions.
4. The fourth and final stage is called a 'culture fit' interview. I came in, ate lunch lunch which they provided as they have lunch catered for the entire staff each day. I then had three forty-five minute interviews, each with three different people. Many of their questions were repeats from previous stages of the interview process. Different employees had highly varying degrees of preparation for this. One person asked me specifically about something I had written in a previous stage of the interviewing process while another admitted to me that they had been required to look at some of them but had not.
This portion of the interviewing process is also where I met their CEO, Lloyd Armbrust, whose interviewing style I can only describe as 'brutal'. I found Lloyd many of Lloyd's questions to be unprofessional, as well as unnecessarily personal in a way that was antagonistic. He insulted me directly multiple times throughout the course of the interview. A charitable explanation for this might be that, because I was applying for a customer support position, he wanted to know how I would react to a difficult or rude customer. Because I failed this portion of the interview, I fully understand that my experience of Lloyd may be interpreted as sour grapes to some. However, many other employees during the other interviews asked me with trepidation whether I had met Lloyd yet and told me he does this regularly. One employee even volunteered the information that they had specifically asked not to be put in an interview with Lloyd for this reason. I am only including this in my review as I was given the impression by multiple people that this is a regular portion of their interviewing process.
Despite my negative experience meeting the CEO, I am still leaving a positive review as I genuinely enjoyed getting to meet many other people at their company and I appreciated their speed and transparency in getting back to me.
