COVALENT MARKETING Interview Questions & Reviews

Interviewed Jan 2012 in Chicago, IL (took 4 weeks)

I emailed my résumé and cover letter to a representative of the company regarding a position I came across on my University's Career Services Website. Within 2 weeks I received an email from Covalent's HR representative, inviting me to the company headquarters for an informational overview of the company, and a series of 1:1 interviews with the company's top executives.

I was one of about 12 candidates brought in for the interview; we were seated in a conference room and addressed by the CEO of the company, who gave us an overview of Covalent's history, best practices, and an example or two of previous work they had done. After the informational overview, the 3 executives took turns interviewing the candidates 1 on 1 for about 20 minutes, asking questions ranging from the standard "What motivates you?" or "Describe a time when you have failed, and what did you learn from that experience?" to more open ended questions that were open to personal interpretation, such as "What is innovation?" or "How many phonebooks are in the United States?" In between interviews candidates sat in the conference room with 4 other Covalent Marketing employees, and were welcomed to pick the brains of people that had been with the company for a while (this casual atmosphere was a nice opportunity to meet other employees and ask questions that may have been overlooked in the formal interviews).

After the first round of interviews, I waited about a week before I was again contacted and invited to lunch with one of the executives. At lunch we went over the position in more detail and talked about what would be the next steps of the interview process. I was told that they were interested in me to fill their need for a Marketing Technology position. After asking to be sent a formal offer discussing the compensation and benefits associated with the position, I was given about a week to make my decision whether or not to accept the offer. After a few days of deliberation, I decided to accept the position.

Overall, the interview process was pretty standard. My only critique is that I would have appreciated a bit more in-depth description of the position at the initial interviews. Being a small company it was nice to get to meet and interview with the people that started it all, as well as meeting, and getting to spend time with, the employees that would eventually become my colleagues.