Last year, I had the opportunity to interview at Hearst Magazine. First, I submitted my application in, and one day later the recruiter sent me an email to schedule a normal phone interview. The interview process went as followed:
- Recruiter screening
- In person interview with hiring manager and another person
- Take Home assignment (I had to create a powerpoint that asked for my approach to different questions, and then asked to analyze a dataset and show my findings. It took me 3 days to complete)
- Another "final" in-person interview with two people I would potentially be working with
There are many reasons why I give Hearst a negative review. First, the interviewers seemed like they didn't know what they truly wanted in a candidate. And in the Final interview, one of the interviewers seemed too "busy" to even bother, and kept pausing the interview to check her phone and respond back to messages, and then would complain about the "lack of common sense" people had in the department. When I asked her "what soft skills do you need to succeed at Hearst?" she told me "diplomatic. Because it's very political here". And then kept shaking her head.
In addition, I received a call before Christmas break from the recruiter. She told me that they haven't made a decision about my candidacy yet because they didn't get the chance to interview other people before Christmas, so she'll let me know in the New Year in January. However, I never heard back from her afterwards. It sucks to put in so much work to join the company, only for them to not even give me a response back.