After applying, I was contacted by a recruiter. There were a series of virtual interviews with various people, including two junior team members who would report into this role. There were always at least two interviewers on each virtual interview.
The company has been experiencing significant revenue growth in recent years but hasn't been investing in some of the non revenue producing areas. Consequently, they are years behind where they should be to move the business forward.
I was impressed by the passion that the founders showed for the business as well as some of the growth opportunities that exist. They didn't hold back about the challenges faced by the company because of their lack of investment in the team. I appreciated this honesty.
However, as the process went on, some red flags definitely came up. (1) One of the junior people came into a later interview supposedly because he could provide technical insight to the team as to whether I had the knowledge to address their issues. It became quickly apparent, however, that he didn't have a basic understanding of certain technical issues which were exacerbating the company's problems. I support having junior people participate in the interview process and have done that many times in my career. However, they shouldn't be used as technical "experts" when they really don't have the knowledge to fill that role in an interview. (2) An interviewer told a story about how a junior person wasn't getting what they needed from IT after several months and vented about it. They were told to send an angry email to IT . This got the person what they needed. This story was told in a matter of fact way that made it seem that this was acceptable behavior. It was also said that IT is often not responsive to non revenue generating requests. Given that the CIO is one of the co-founders and was involved in the interview process, this seems like a huge cultural red flag if IT isn't a good internal partner. The junior person should never have had to do this to get what they needed. (3) In multiple interviews, people asked for answers to solve company-specific problems. In at least some of these cases, the data came from a proprietary system. No outside candidate could have this level of specific information to answer questions like this. They also wanted plans of action to address specific issues in a granular way. No external candidate could do this in a credible way and it made it appear that the company doesn't really know what it wants at a macro level. Instead, it seems that they just wanted someone to solve specific problems at a tactical level and didn't know how to vet a candidate without diving into details that no external candidate is going to know. (4) This was the first time that the company had ever used the Wonderlic assessment and it showed. Experienced users of the assessment use it earlier in the process as part of the overall evaluation, not as the last item to help resolve internal debate over candidates. (5) The recruiter for this role left the company after less than a year and others seem not last longer than 1-2 years. This is definitely a cultural issue that needs to be addressed.
