The overall experience was very disappointing. A sneaky, unfair process, which has more to do with stealing ideas from experienced seniors from the market than with selecting the right person for a leadership role.
I participated in three rounds, of which the first one was the usual HR interview, and unproblematic.
At the 2nd round, I was a bit surprised that I was interviewed by two junior members of the future team, but we had at least a friendly and nice discussion about general topics. I thought that they obviously want to check team fit before competence first, which was a bit unusual, but ok.
After that round, they asked me to analyze a big bunch of call center data, and to prepare a presentation from it incl. the answers to a couple of questions, as a discussion base for the next round. Both the data and the questions were admittedly related to their real-life scenarios and problems. At this point, I felt a bit uncomfortable to solve their problems before I even got the chance to talk to any senior hiring manager, but I finally prepared a nice, 10 page .ppt document in a professional manner, which took two days of work to put together. After I first submitted it, they even asked me to provide even more detailed and concrete descriptions about the problem solution and implementation plan part of the answers, which I originally just drafted in some bullet points, expecting to talk about it in more detail in person at the next stage. Finally I got the feedback that they liked it, and wanted to move me forward in the process.
At the 3rd interview round however, the interviewer was again some rookie peer team member, who has not even seen my presentation, and didn't comment on it. He asked me some very basic questions about the most simple processes in general, which appeared too simple compared to the position and so I gave broader, holistic answers in order to raise the quality of the conversation. As a result however, I realized after a while, that the interviewer didn't even understand my explanations, since he didn't reflect on them, and kept asking the same questions again later, as if we hadn't discussed them yet. He obviously tried to tick some boxes on his checklist in a very “digital” way, but then a multiple choice test would have served the purpose better, since he wasn’t able to filter out the right information from the discussion. I can imagine, that those boxes remained unchecked due to that. The other, very irritating thing was, that he kept asking the same question in the Head of Customer Support interview: " how can we grow?" again and again. I have previous experience as a GM and business unit manager as well, but this role wasn't about that, so it was not clear to me what he expects me to talk about (net revenue growth? market share? team sizing? margin optimization? capacity or volume increase?) and he wasn't able to clarify. To my repeated questions, I finally got the answer that they are rather looking for a GM than the announced position, and I can tune my answers according to that. We were already running over time then, so pointless as it appeared, I didn't restart the chat with them. I was later notified that they are not continuing with me.
My advice to the company: If you seemingly put your employees under such pressure to improve, innovate and grow which they cannot handle and therefore already try to steal ideas from others, then either pay for the consultancy, or make sure that you secure a proper and fair interview process to give yourself the chance to hire such people who can.