Though the idea behind BA is excellent, the way they conducted interviews is messy and unprofessional. The following are some pros and cons I found from my one-month interview with them.
Pro:
The idea is excellent since they try to help underrepresented families to get better preschool education.
The C-level staff is friendly and interesting, and I enjoyed talking to them.
Con:
The whole process is lengthy and not organized well. It took me more than one month to complete the entire process. I was told to have another technical screening on the day of the “final” round interview. The story did not end here. Just a couple of hours before this technical screening, I was told that the interview was canceled because the interviewer was sick. Though it was rare, I thought it was still understandable. However, the story did not end here either. I was told that another interviewer could do it the next day. I gave them my availability, and their HR confirmed and said I would get a meeting invitation. However, two hours later, HR sent me an email saying that the interviewer could not do it and that they needed to reschedule it. I did not get any meeting invite until the next day.
The sequence of rounds does not make sense. I have spent days preparing their 2nd and “final” round, in which you need to talk to their C-level staff for a couple of hours, as some other reviewers said, but I found it is that 40 mins technical screening that made the final decision. If they could put this post-final technical screening in the first round, it would save a lot of time and effort for both parties, though I’m afraid I have to disagree with their conclusion on me from it (if their conclusion were true, I should have been kicked out by my current company instead of getting a promotion)
The technical assessment step (2nd round) is weird and time and effort-consuming. Unlike other organizations I have interviewed, you don’t answer questions, code for specific questions, or make designs for a virtual scenario. You need to provide a working solution for a dummy situation. You will not only provide all your codes to them, and they also need to run queries against your solution. They don’t offer you the platform, so I had to use my account on a cloud provider to complete this assessment. Though the monetary cost is not huge, the time and effort you spend are significant. Moreover, you assumed that you did a good job since no questions were asked about this assessment, but the post-final technical screening made the final decision.
I wish BA could improve the organizing and designing of interviews. I think the organization evaluates the job candidates through interviews, but the job candidates also examine the organization from it. Good luck to BA, and I really want to see more and more kids can benefit from your idea.