The company reached out to me set up a screening call based on my grocery industry experience. An initial interview was set up on the screening call for the next day. That interview was cancelled the day of due to 1) the interviewer being pulled into a meeting and 2) department restructuring. They said they would be back in touch when they were ready to fill the position again. About a month later the job gets reposted, no word from the company. I submitted a formal application and let my contact know. Hear back about 3 weeks after that and the initial interview gets set up. Interview consisted of some fairly basic grocery and metric/data questions. Interviewer didn’t seem to have much experience on the grocery end of things as they asked for clarification on some grocery terminology. The strangest question was in regards to my comfort level working with software since my entire background is in the grocery field. I was asked after the interview concluded if this position was something I’d be interested in and plans were made for a “case study” interview next. About 4-5 days prior to the case study interview, a .pdf document and three Excel files were e-mailed. The premise was that this was to be a role-play business meeting with a customer and they gave a very brief background on the customer and situation (nothing relevant). No prompt was given, no suggested reports, data, or numbers were asked for. I took this to be an open-ended set of data, so I worked with it as most in the grocery industry would showing metrics such as Gross Profit, Shrink, Sales, breaking things down by week and even by department/commodity and presented that during the interview. There was some confusion from the 3 interviewers and it was very clear this was not what they were looking for. No feedback was given and about a week later I received an e-mail saying they were moving forward with candidates that were a closer fit for them at the moment. Long story short, the lack of communication during the process, long delays in setting up and actually conducting the interviews, and the extremely vague “case study” document left a very poor taste in my mouth. In addition, it feels this company should be grocery focused yet they’re trying to act like with a tech/software mindset instead of embracing grocery and speaking the language of their current and potential customers.

Week 1 - 30 min phone screen with recruiter Week 2 - 1 hour with head of dept over coffee Week 3 - 1 hour with co-founder in office Week 4 - 1 hour with the other co-founder and head of sales