Restoration Hardware Associate Leader Interview Questions & Reviews

Interviewed Dec 2011 in Short Hills, NJ (took 2 days)

What a ridiculous place!! This store in particular is desperately short of management - the "leader" sounds (never met her) very young and inexperienced, I heard through a contact that's true. Asst. and assoc. managers are leaving, they're perpetually short-staffed, and managers from other stores have to fill in and train the store manager. When I called she sounded so thrilled to have someone interested who has experience, but was too busy to schedule an interview. Someone called me back to schedule, and when I went in, they were - short staffed - and canceled (no one bothered to call before) because the asst. manager wanted to spend a lot of time with me to "really get to know me". They called me back to reschedule. This time I confirmed the morning of the interview before I went in. Met with another assoc. leader that "really wanted to get to know me", who launched into how some people are put off by the personal questions (really?) but I'd been warned by my contact, and played along. It seems to be more important to RH that you're such an engaging person by their standards than that you have managerial or sales experience. Of course, they have no interest in supporting your life outside work, they just want to know all about it and deem whether it's worthy of them. He barely talked about the company or store, and nothing about the actual job - I had to keep bringing the conversation back to business type questions and their hiring needs, otherwise we would have been talking about extracurricular activities the whole time. He wrapped up by saying they will absolutely get back to me the next week - unlike other companies, RH respects you and will get back to you either way. Never heard from them, despite emailing and calling.

Their interview process is supposedly 3 interviews with different levels of staff over a month or so. Turns out the guy that "really wanted to get to know me" had already given 2 weeks notice when he did the interview. Ironically, the sales staff looked like a really nice group of diverse, intelligent people.