HBO Interview Questions

It was an in person interview. Everyone was very friendly and I thought it went really well...well to the point that I was very excited. After that it was complete radio silence. I finally had to accept I wasn’t in the running when they re-posted the position.

I did a video interview, which was easy and clear to follow. The process was quite short, with 2-3 days between application submission and invitation to schedule a video interview.

The first round of interviews. I received a call from HBO. This conference call is mainly an overview of my background. They will provide more detailed information about rol, such as who they are looking for and what is the company background. There is a technical problem.

Applied online. HR interview, and then two individual interviews after that. Each interview was about 1 month apart. The interviewers were all very nice, however seemed to be very disorganized.

I was disappointed with the lack of communication during this process. I found the whole process very unorganized and just overall very rude. I was called in to interview with HR and was originally scheduled to meet with several members of the team afterwards. After the initial interview, I waited a long time and was told the other members no longer had time to meet with me and they would have to call me back after the holiday break. I never heard back and was eventually told they went a different direction. It just felt like I never got a fair shot by meeting with the actual team.

A recruiter reached out to me regarding the role. One of the worst interviewing experience of my career - can echo the other negative reviews as my process (or lack thereof) was similar. Recruiter reached out to me in regards to a role at the new HBO Max after "liking my background". Once I said I would be interested in finding out more (and following up twice), it took 1.5 weeks from the initial reach out to receive another reply setting up an interview time. We had a great phone chat, at the end of which he said he would be moving me onto the next round as I seemed like a great fit. Fast forward several more weeks and radio silence. I'd follow up and hear nothing. Finally 3 weeks after the initial call, I receive a copy and pasted rejection (filled with typos, mind you) saying they have decided to pursue other candidates. How about don't reach out to talent only to ghost them?

The interview process is pretty fast. The only problem is that I can't understand the system design question and a OOD problem which was about some specific card game. Except for the two rounds, algorithm rounds are pretty normal and just practicing leetcode could help a lot.

The interview process went as expected. It was Hirevue interview. In addition to normal questions, the questions were centered towards the job description, so prepare for that and you will succeed.

Amateur Hour, easily the worst recruiter call I've ever had. I've had to have spoken to over a thousand recruiters over the years and all of them have been more prepared, polished, and professional than my experience with my HBO recruiter. Even the fine people at Peloton who put you on speaker and eat their lunch on the call were more pleasant to deal with. The first red flag was when my recruiter complained that my only availability was 7AM. “do you have any other times other than 7am?”
 Well, the position you’re recruiting for is in EST and I am in EST so if you don’t tell me you’re on PST then I have no way of knowing that. I work with recruiters in the Bay Area who have no problem working on New York time when they are filling roles in New York.

 The next red flag came when the recruiter asked me about why I was interested in the role. I never applied to this role, I was contacted on a recruitment platform. I was very honest and said I was hoping to learn more about the role as I didn’t know much. I asked about what the team did and just got back useless generic statements like “build software/tools to help our internal teams with their workflow.” When I asked anything about the architecture or stack I was told that I would need to speak to someone more technical. Regardless the recruiter kept pressing me to gauge my level of interest. I told them I could gauge my interest more once I spoke to someone who could answer my questions. Sorry not sorry, I’m not trying to spend the next two years of my life modularizing a spaghetti monolith and then Frankensteining those modules into something resembling an event based system — all while maintaining a product backlog. I know thats not for me because I’ve already done that and I don’t care to repeat that experience.

 The last and biggest red flag was when my recruiter asked me about my salary history. For the uninitiated, it is illegal to do this in the state of New York and there are additional city laws as well making it illegal to ask about salary history in NYC. I was really surprised to hear this and let him know that his question was actually against the law. To which he responded: “well everyone else has answered it.” At that point there was no way I could take this guy seriously. Like I mentioned before, I have worked with recruiters on the West Coast and have never had any mess this up. Beyond that I’m honestly awestruck by the thought process here: someone points out that you’re doing something illegal and you double down on it? What a way to win over talent.

 Needless to say I never actually got to speak with somebody technical. 
“Unfortunately, the team has decided not to move forward with your application.” 
Works for me. Please let your boss know that you’re breaking state and city laws on the regular. I'd call them out by name but honestly would feel bad if they lost hours in this climate. I'm hoping this recruiter was just having a bad day but something tells me they honestly think they do a good job.

I went through a video interview through hirevue. The process was easy enough, but I never heard any feedback. I assumed I didn't make it to the next round, but an email confirming this would have been appreciated. I wouldn't expect a big company like that to be overly personal, but an automated email would have sufficed.