The interview was a 4-part process after initial contact with company: HR interview, manager interview, technical assessment, and sales presentation assessment. In total process lasted approximately 8 weeks, though five of those were waiting on the contract (more on that later).
1. HR Interview:
I was assigned an HR rep to handle my candidacy who was nice and very responsive. The first interview was very easy, mainly going over the process, position, and my high-level suitability for the role.
2. Manager Interview:
I then had a chat with my would-be direct manager; another great person who answered my questions and concerns transparently. Her main goal was to assess my overall suitability for her team and to prep me for the next two stages.
3. Technical Assessment:
I was given a set of tasks of increasing difficulty to complete within the New Relic platform. Task descriptions were relatively open-ended and so I expect each person would solve them in different ways. I was then asked to present and discuss my progress, roadblocks, solutions, and next steps to a Technical Account Manager on the team I’d join so they could assess my technical fitness with the role.
I asked for a little over a week to complete it and that was granted without issue. I enjoyed the entire process and felt it was appropriately challenging. Very nice to meet a potential future teammate and the interaction was reasonably professional, but not overly so.
4. Sales Presentation Assessment:
I was asked to prepare a presentation pitching New Relic to a “client” to highlight how I handle business/sales type conversations and pitch the platform to business leaders. Prompt was SUPER open-ended, which made it more difficult, but also more interesting as you need to pull on your background experience to create an interesting use case. I was asked to prepare this in 48 hours and I agreed (I could have extended if needed, but I wanted to keep the process moving). I then pitched it to a panel of sales and customer-facing leaders who played the “client” and asked business-type questions. This too was a good experience.
Overall Feedback:
This is a long and tough process that requires a high level of commitment from both the company and the candidate to complete. However, the assessments are both interesting and engaging and of reasonable difficulty, which made them not really feel like “work” to me. They will likely lose some decent candidates who simply don’t have time, but I think that’s outweighed by the quality of the candidates that do make it through (and the likelihood of those candidates accepting the offer).
From a non-process perspective, the biggest selling point for New Relic for me was the people. Every single employee I interacted with exuded competence, kindness, patience, humility, and a desire to help and improve. The process provide ample opportunities for New Relic to show this strength and use it to keep candidates motivated.
I have two main points of critical feedback that are important to mention:
1) I found that some of the information provided to me by HR on vacation and compensation did not completely aligned with reality. Specifically, the 30% of my salary based on team performance fluctuates a lot based upon the metrics used and seasonal variations which means my actual gross salary will likely end up less than 100% of the total contractual amount. Also, the company normally has just one “recharge week” in the summer rather than the two mentioned (with the other in winter). In both cases, the responses from my HR rep provided caveats and wiggle room on these points making them not “incorrect,” but they could have been more accurate without reducing my interest in the position.
2) The time between the final assessment, a verbal job offer, and the official contract was borderline unacceptable. It took two weeks to get me a verbal offer (which I accepted immediately) and then another three weeks to get a contract for me to sign. Five weeks is a long time to be in limbo, particularly since I had another offer waiting on a response. It is likely that this was an outlier due to summer vacations and the company going through an acquisition, but better expectation-setting (I was told to wait another 24-48 hours 7-8 times) would have helped.
In the end, the people, position, and offer outweighed the few dark spots and I was happy to accept this offer over the other that I was considering.
