The process was thorough, if nothing else. I applied for the position online in August and received an email from the recruiter two days later setting up a time for me to have a call with the hiring manager. We had a good conversation and I moved to the next stage of the process, a three hour virtual interview split into four parts.
The first part was a chat with a current customer success manager, the next was a talk with a customer success team lead. Both went very well. The third was a panel - I was given an assignment several days before to prepare a mock quarterly business review, which I had to present to the panel. This was tough - the scenario they gave was that the "customer" I'd be presenting to had just hired a new CTO that wanted to cancel the contract. However, I put in a lot of effort (created a presentation with slides etc.) and did lots of research into the feature requests etc. that had been outlined in the scenario (several of the complaints were going to be solved with an upcoming feature release) and I got very positive feedback after. Finally, there was another video call with the hiring manager.
I got an email several days after saying that they'd like to move forward with an in-person interview. Due to scheduling conflicts, this didn't happen for more than a month.
Things also got a little strange when I got an email 10 days before the planned onsite in New York. I was supposed to meet with some team members there, and meet with others virtually during the onsite. However, I was told that they had made a mistake in scheduling and they would like to fly me out to SF for an onsite here. I was also introduced to the recruiter leading hiring for the role for the first time, and I saw that the hiring manager had also changed to someone else.
There was a surprising amount of back and forth booking travel. I was given a list of four hotels to choose from, and picked the cheapest room available at the one hotel that wasn't sold out. I selected the cheapest nonstop economy flight that would allow me to miss only one day of work. I got an email back saying both of these choices were out of policy and that I had to select a more "economical option." When I replied with confusion, they ended up approving the travel in any case - it was somewhat strange.
The in-person interview lasted around four hours. I first met with a solutions engineer, then had a video call with a NY-based sales leader. I then had a mock call, which I had been briefed on via email a few days before the interview. It was again a bit of a hostile scenario - I had to call the "customer", who was very angry about us missing a deadline for a promised feature by several months with no communication. I thought I handled it well, however, and again got positive feedback from the team in the room.
I then met with the global head of customer success, and then had lunch with the hiring manager and two other members of the team. Following that, I had a wrap up chat with the hiring manager, where he answered my questions well about why the hiring manager had changed etc. He described the rest of the process to me, and basically said that if they wanted to move forward after this, the final two interviews (quick phone calls with the CRO and the CEO or COO) were basically a formality.
It seemed to me that I had built a great rapport with the team and I had received very positive feedback during the process, so I was very surprised and quite disappointed to get a call letting me know they had decided not to move forward.
What was very frustrating was that due to "policy" they couldn't give me any useful feedback at all - the decision was basically a black box.
I don't really care about this if it's the first or even second round of an interview, but at that stage to have spent 7+ hours interviewing, not to mention 12+ hours traveling and several hours doing prep for the interviews and projects, it felt almost disrespectful of my time and effort to not be able to give me ANY hint as to what I could do better in the future, or any reasons that they had decided not to move forward. It left me with a bitter taste in my mouth, and that's what keeps me from giving a positive review.
