Initial phone screening with recruiter, video interview with hiring manager a week later. The phone screening focused on my cv as well as some customer support competency-based questions (standard stuff really). The recruiter sent me some information to prepare for the interview, which focused primarily on completing some tasks within Hubspot in advance of the interview. A portion of the interview is dedicated to screen sharing, with some questions around the tasks you completed, and also a customer roleplay exercise. It was explained to me that this is to assess how you approach problem-solving activities. Unfortunately I was advised within 3 days after the interview that I was unsuccessful and would not be progressing to the next stage. Upon reflection, I feel that my nerves may have made me a little flustered, but this would have been helped if I had been properly prepared. With this in mind, I don’t feel I was given appropriate guidance in advance of the interview. I was asked technical questions which I feel were outside of the scope of the tasks that I was asked to complete in advance. I understand that ‘curve balls’ are to be expected in interviews, and that there can be merit in assessing how someone reacts in this situation, but in my case I feel those questions were beyond the scope of what should have been asked based on the actions that were required in advance of the interview, and seem a little unfair or even excessive. I managed to mostly complete the tasks, but I would’ve been much better prepared if I had better guidance. Having said that, I would love to work at Hubspot, and I may well consider applying for a role again in the future. For anyone applying for a CSS role, my advice (aside from preparing responses for competency-based questions) is focused mainly on the technical exercise. I was asked to create multiple contacts in Hubspot and add a state/region for each contact (it seems that this is not a default field when adding a contact, so be prepared to have to do a bit of digging around to find out how to add these); and then create lists following which you can generate reports based on a state/region criteria (know the different types of lists and what they are for, as you may be asked about this in the interview, and be aware that lists for me took about 20 mins after creating them before reporting worked properly, not sure if that was correct functionality or maybe a bug but it was quite frustrating), and be prepared to explain/demo this via screen sharing in the interview. You are also asked to create a landing page and add a picture, be prepared to explain during the interview what you did. I was also asked how to create a form on the landing page which would allow a customer to sign up by entering their email+name+state/region (also, know how to make the state/region field a dropdown field as opposed to a freeform field). This wasn’t flagged to me in advance, and this is where I stumbled a bit, but at the time I thought handled the roleplay ok. Be prepared by looking at some of the different features of the landing page, such as if you had to add some additional features on the landing page. Also, I can’t be certain of this but I believe that using the resources available to you during the roleplay/screen sharing (i.e. Hubspot Knowledgebase and, more importantly, Google!) should be of immense help to you to get through this, and it’s probably expected of you. Hope this helps you to be properly prepared if you pass the recruiter screening!