5 Rount Interview:
1. 30 min phone call with recruiter: This was simple and straightforward. Asked about your resume, your experiences, and classes. Some questions include "Tell me about yourself", "what is your favorite class and why?", "what experience do you have with SQL" etc. The recruiter then tells you about the next step (technical screening)
2. Technical screening through CodeSignal: You then take a timed SQL assessment. It was honestly harder than I expected it to be. The questions were long. The hardest part is that you take it in a text editor so you cannot run your SQL commands. You also don't get your score or any feedback.
3. 30 min Teams Interview with the recruiter and team: Typical behavioral interview where they ask about your experience and talk more about the job. They ask what you're looking for in a job to see if you really align with this position. This however is where I started feeling deceived. They ask how you thought you did on the technical assessment. It felt really deceptive because they followed this by saying how low my score was (mind you, they didn't tell me my score so I had no idea how I actually did) and then proceeded to question your experience. They then told me the role I applied to was actually in a team by itself (despite earlier saying it was part of a team, lots of mentoring and teamwork in earlier phone screening and job posting) and would require me to be trained for 1 year and then taking over that position. It just would've been nice if they clarified that from the start instead of making it seem different. One of the questions I asked the team was their favorite part of working there and they said "teamwork" but this person's role works on a team by themself! lol! Anyway still got invited to do the next round which was an in-person interview presenting a project (preferably related to SQL)
4. Project presentation + in-person interview: They ask you to prepare a slideshow to demonstrate a project. I go in and check in, wait because the interview they scheduled before me went long (they should have scheduled a bigger gap between us). They guide me to a conference room and I present my project and they ask questions on it and other interview questions. This goes pretty well. I get good constructive criticism on my project from the team lead but it was totally fair. At this point it's been about an hour so I am expecting the interview to end. I'm also expecting this to be the final interview since no one online ever mentions a 5th and the recruiter never tells me anything about it. However, the recruiter then tells me there is a final round with the company executive over Teams where they ask you to pseudocode live (like leetcode questions). I think it's a little odd because this role isn't classical programming (doesn't even require a CS degree) and more running and creating scripts but that's fine since I would have time to prepare (or so I thought). However, I'm then asked to code right then and there on the whiteboard for the recruiter to send to the executive. The questions were easy but I totally blanked and panicked since I wasn't expecting it for this role nor informed this would happen at this interview. I guess I should have been prepared but no one mentioned anything about coding. The recruiter tells me it's fine and that this won't affect how they score my interview (but it totally did)
5. Teams interview with Executive: I didn't make it this far.
Overall, I thought it was kind of ridiculous to have 5 rounds for an entry-level position at a small company. In between rounds I waited a long time to hear back. Every round I learned more about the role that was different than what they made it out to seem on the job posting. They had unrealistic expectations for an entry-level role, especially since they insisted they could teach you everything through training. I felt like they wasted both of our time since they were not honest about what they were expecting and the role from the start. I also had to go in-person for the 4th round but there was no tour of the office/lab. I'm not sure why they made the interview in-person. However, the team members I met were very nice. If you are to interview here, don't expect to be close with your coworkers (everyone seems to just do their job and not be too interactive with each other) and make sure you have strong SQL and pseudocode skills! Good luck!
