Was referred by internal employee. Had two 30 min interviews with Sourcer & Recruiter. Both of them were pleasant to talk to and informative. Once you get your Recruiter, that person will be your best asset...ask them any questions you have and write down EVERY WORD they say :) The next 3 stages are available publicly if you Google: Leadership, Role Related Knowledge and General Cognitive Ability. The Leadership questions will be the usual behavioral/structured “tell me a time when ___”. Try to only talk about situations where you used data to make your decision, worked with a team, and discuss how the situation improved/didn’t improve and what you learned or how you grew. Kudos to Google for looking at this holistically. In the General Cognitive Ability test, it kind of reminds me of a Mgmt Consultants Case Study (google on youtube) but not so stringent. Ask questions to clarify, ask about metrics and be ready to make them up if they give you that freedom. Write down your notes...get your thoughts together and present a strategy or two and be ready for them to drill down into that. FYI, it seems that there’s some variability in how this is conducted. My interviewer was very gracious in how he/she went about doing this but thats not always the case. For the RRK, go through Coursera and do one of two of the basic 6-7 hour foundation courses so you can hear the interview ask super high level questions about IaaS/PaaS/CI/CD etc and address them in a way they can see you understand the topic. Unfortunately, I had this same type of role 10+ years ago and my day to day job is solely SaaS focused. I took the training to refresh but due to scheduling, it ended up being a month before the interview and unfortunately, all that short term cramming flubbed me up during the RRK interview. Don’t take this for granted...I do a similar role in my sleep for one of the top companies in the world and speak at national conferences but if you have a mental blip during the questioning that can potentially be enough to sink you if they have someone else thats comparable. Don’t think that they’ll go on your LinkedIn Profile or call references to double check that. It’s up to you to convince them during the interview as it should be.
Overall it was a super positive experience and I liked everyone I interviewed with. The recruiter Jessica was PHENOM!! If you’re rejected, you can’t interview for another SE role for 6 months. Jessica was awesome in recommending different potential roles to interview for in the meantime.
And overall, don’t take rejection as a “no”...I tell people that interview at my company that if you really want to work for a specific company and you have the legit background to do it, keep interviewing! It really is all about timing and the need for a specific skill set. If you haven’t interviewed for a while, that could affect things too so don’t read too much into a rejection.
P.s. the interviews were held via Google Hangouts which is kind of crazy / new school. Use something like interviewstream.com to have basic questions asked and record yourself answering them so you can listen to them, throw up a little, and then practice more to improve. Also, there is a cool iOS app called Ummo (sp?) you can use to analyze filler words and words per minute etc.
