Gild Interview Questions & Reviews

Interviewed Nov 2011 in San Francisco, CA (took 1+ week)

I have been on six or seven interviews in the past month and a half. All of them have been positive, productive and good learning experiences... except for my interview with Gild.

After an extremely positive initial phone interview, I was excited to meet with the Gild team. They asked me to show up at 3:30PM on a Friday. I was instructed to call one of the interviewers when I got there and they would let me into the building.

I showed up at 3:20PM and called. No answer, no big deal... I was early. At 3:40PM I called again. At 3:50PM, the interviewer finally came to greet me. His greeting was less than enthusiastic. He told me they were pressed for time, had overbooked, and met my attempts at pleasantries and small talk with silence and grunting.

I sat in the lobby for an additional ten minutes while waiting for the first interviewer to finish something up. When he was finally ready, the first thing he did was to refuse to shake my hand. He said he hadn't washed his hands in a while. This was an extremely negative note on which to start the interview.

While he spent 5 minutes looking for my resume, which he had clearly not yet seen, he asked me, "Why do you want to work for Gild?"

One sentence into my answer, he cut me off and proceeded to TELL ME why I wanted to work for the company. It wasn't a big deal, however this turned into the pattern for the next 20-30 minutes. He would ask me a question, interrupt me and answer it himself. He also challenged me vehemently, repeatedly and in an accusatory way about why I wanted to leave my current position.

At no point during the interview did I feel I was given a chance to promote my candidacy for the position or explain how my experience and skills would make me an asset to the team. I was not given a chance to present myself as a potential addition, but was rather made to feel like I was an inconvenience as a visitor to the office.

At the conclusion of the 20-30 minute interview, which I was told would last 1-2 hours and had to take a half vacation day for, the interviewer again refused to shake my hand. He then proceeded to stand four feet from me and whisper into the second interviewers ear.

The second interviewer took me into a separate room and informed me that the team had "everything they needed and would be in touch soon. We didn't need to conduct the second interview."

At that point I said, "this probably isn't a very good fit, is it?" At that point he became visibly nervous, uncomfortable and was unable to answer my question. As a professional who values his own time, I simply wanted to get a straight answer from a company that had acted disinterested and unengaged with me from the get go. They couldn't even provide me with that courtesy.

As an interviewee, I was excited for the challenge of the position at Gild and prepared accordingly to represent myself as a good candidate. Rather than have a chance to present my case, I was met with a complete lack of professionalism, courtesy and politeness. The Gild staff, in particular the first interviewer, were rude, unprofessional and inconsiderate.

I would hope that a company that values skills as part of the employment process would also be in tune with the other half... namely professional courtesy, but I guess that was not the case.

I truly hope that I caught them on an off day. Either way, I highly recommend approaching any interview with Gild with caution. I can't even imagine how terrible it would be to work with these people.