Visa Inc Marketing Interview Questions & Reviews

Interviewed Nov 2008 in Foster City, CA (took 3 weeks)

I found some parts of the Visa interview process to be terribly frustrating and unprofessional and in my opinion, no part of any interview process should be unprofessional, especially since I'm prone to believe that the interview process is rather indicative of what working life is like at a company......

A few things:

- I originally recruited through on-campus recruiting, applying for a Strategy position. When I was invited back for the final rounds, I was told that role no longer existed and so I could apply for finance, marketing or product development. I chose marketing.. as it was the closest available option to my skill set. I could've just turned down the interview but figured that they wouldn't bring me back if they didnt think I was capable of the other roles available.....I later found out that I was not hired because I didnt have a strong enough marketing background and that they thought my skill set was more suited for a strategy role......
- The interviews lasted nearly all day from around 9a to 3:30p, including an interview during lunch. I had to awkwardly try to eat my sandwich while being interviewed. I found it annoying but maybe they were just preparing us for what working at Visa would be like?
-Visa HR forgot (twice) to call me to let me know that I didnt get a job. They originally told us that we'd hear back within 2-3 weeks. When 3 weeks passed and I hadn't heard back, I emailed the recruiter to touch base who responded via email that the other HR person had "forgotten" to call me. He then wanted to schedule a time to talk which I found rather painful since it was pretty obvious that I hadn't gotten the job at that point. I scheduled a call with him and then he forgot to call AGAIN. He called a few hours later and left a message saying he got caught up doing something else but didnt bother giving me the news over vmail (which is fair....but he basically already did when he told me I was "forgotten" about so I found this to be rather annoying. We then proceeded to play phone tag a few times until it got to the point where I just told him to update me over email or voice mail b/c I was tired of playing phone tag. Given it is HR's job to interact with candidates, I found it ridiculous that this process dragged on for over a month and a half, and that they were so unprofessional in the process.

Hopefully this was a freak occurence and not Visa's standard HR process!

As for interview tips/questions:

I was asked to describe my brand - i.e. how would I market myself?
I had a couple case studies (involving electronic payments as to be expected)
the rest were mainly behavioral, asking about past experience, tell me a time when....., and the expected - why do you want to work at Visa, why this role, etc.