ExactTarget Interview Questions & Reviews

Interview Details – I went on an on campus interview at my school. They asked very basic behavioral questions. After a 2nd interview (phone), they have a finalist night in Indianapolis at HQ. It was from 2-8. Met and interviewed with 2 managers and underwent a group 'case'.

Interview Details – I was selected to move forward for a phone interview. The interview lasted roughly 15 minutes and was very short and to the point.

Interview Details – 1. Preliminary call by HR rep
2. An onsite interview with multiple people
3. Another interview

This interview process spanned three months.

In mid November, I applied for a Pardot position in Atlanta and within a couple of days, I was contacted by a Pardot HR rep. He asked the typical questions like "Why do you want to work here?", "Tell me about yourself.", "How much are you looking for?", and "Why are you looking to leave your current job?". The week after Thanksgiving, I was invited out the Pardot office. The interview was not structured. I was interviewed by at least 6 different people, because they did not know how to interview. Some of the questions were more of engineering questions, while others were social questions. The interview lasted over two hours. Next was a video conference interview with the ExactTarget hiring manager in mid December. They asked the same questions as the HR rep. Nothing new in this interview. They basically wanted to see how I interacted with them. After that last interview, I did not hear back from ExactTarget until early January. Actually, I had to request an update from ExactTarget before finding out I didn't get the job.

Interview Details – The process can take a bit of time - due to the rapid growth of the company, HR is pretty taxed. But all communications are clear and thoughtful, and they definitely put you through your paces. I had an HR screener, initial call with three potential future colleagues (the direct mgr, his boss, and another senior member of the team), and then a half-day onsite marathon with additional team members and the SVP of the division. Finally, I delivered a 15-min presentation to the entire team/practice, which is meant to gauge comfort with speaking, cultural fit and ability to adapt to the room and answer questions.

Negotiation Details – Initial offer was not rejected, but as I was considering other (more) competitive offers at the time, they were able to strengthen the offer enough to squelch the competition.

Interview Details – 6 hour long finalist night. 2 one on one interviews and 1 group case study. Pretty standard behavioral interview questions. Nothing too tricky. Both interviewers ask you the same questions so try to come up with different answers.

Negotiation Details – No negociation

Interview Details – The hiring process was okay. They took me through a few tests then had an interview. They were very informative about their company. I took a lot out of it.

Interview Details – Working as a Slingshot (intern) greatly increases your chances to comeback full-time. That is what I did and there was very little interview process for the Catapult (new grad) program.

Negotiation Details – Little to no negotiation for Catapult.

Interview Details – Interview process was a phone screen with recruiter and face-to-face interview on site with five people from new business team.

Interview Details – Based on a posting on a job portal, I applied for the post online. The HR responded back immediately(1-2 days to be precise) to my application and asked to schedule a phone interview.

I made my work visa situation clear and asked if Exact Target was willing to sponsor my visa before we proceeded further in interviewing. Understandably, as it involved legalities, HR took about 10 days to respond to this. She said that Exact Target was fine with my visa situation and was ready to sponsor my visa.

My phone interview was scheduled within 2-3 days after the visa clarification email. Principal Architect called and interviewed on some core java topics and a little OOP concept. It was a 30 minute interview which went well for me.

4-5 days after the phone interview, the onsite interview was scheduled. Onsite interview consisted of a series of 6 interviews. All the interviews were held back to back; each lasting for about 45 minutes. I interviewed with a Senior Project Manager, Principal Architect, a Senior Software Engineer, a couple of Principle Software Engineers and an HR executive.

The downtown office building is conveniently located. To enter the building, I had to sign in at the guest register with building security. The security personnel then guided me to the elevator. I then met the lady at the Exact Target office reception. She was courteous and asked me to wait for the Senior Manager.

The Senior Manager met me in a few minutes. He was polite and courteous. He showed me around the office a little and took me to their cafetaria. It is a neat little area. We then headed back for the interview room. It was a typical interview with a project manager. I got to know a little about their SAAS product and the position for which I was getting interviewed. He asked me about my projects and what I was doing. It was healthy discussion about their requirements and my qualifications. I thought it went well for me.

Then I met the Principal Architect. He was polite and geeky kind of guy. He asked me to develop a program to print "divisible by 5" if a number is divisible by 5, to print "divisible by 3" if the number is divisible by 3, to print "divisible by 15" if the number is divisible by 15. He also asked me to develop a recursive program for the same problem. He asked me questions about ways to improve performance of an application. He also asked me about OOP concepts. Overall, this man knew his stuff well. I thought this interview went alright for me.

Next up, was the interview with the Senior Software Engineer. He was friendly. We talked about the technology stack for the position for which I was interviewing. He asked some basic questions on software development. He then asked me to model the elevator scheduling system using OOP concepts. We also talked about the work culture at Exact Target. He seemed pretty happy with the work and all.

After that was the interviews with 2 Principal Software Engineers. The first one was basically with a guy specializing in database. He asked me few basic database related questions - normalizing, indexing, how to check if a query is working alright. I did not do great here. They were all basic database stuff but I was not well prepared for them. He then asked me about MVC architecture and stuff. My answers for that seemed to have impressed him. He was happy and said specifically that I am a definite go for him ! :)

In the next interview, the guy asked me to develop an algorithm to sort a set of numbers. It was a healthy discussion but I might not have done great here. He then asked me if I participated in any of the open source projects which I did not. Then he asked if I had any questions for him. To that I replied that I did not have any as I had already spoken to 4 other people before him . Maybe I should not have said that. This Mr Principle Engineer was not really impressed, I thought. But this guy also knew his stuff well.

The last interview was with a HR lady. She asked me about my visa status. She asked my - Why Exact Target? She then asked if I had any questions. When I asked when I will get to know the results, she said - maybe about 10 days.That was the end of the onsite interview.

The consecutive interviews for 4 hours definitely seemed daunting but was still fun. I enjoyed the interview experience. The office itself was cool ! The work sounded exciting and cutting edge.

But the thing that gets me is the utter silence after that. The least I expected is an automated sorry email from the exacttarget recruiting saying i was not fit for their requirement. There was not a single reply to 3 emails to the HR and an email to the Senior Manager. I am fine if I am not what they are looking for but I expected just a reply email at least from a company of Exact Target standards !

To all the aspiring candidates, just be good in your fundamentals - oop, java/C#, database, algorithms and datastructures.