Last year I finished university with a background in electrical engineering, I applied to a big strategic consultancy firm, despite hearing that interview process is long and fastidious, I knew it was one of the best start for the carrier, so i wanted to give it a shot. Glassdoor reviews were good.
I trained myself for the job by doing shit tons of what they call “Business case”, it was one of the first interview i was doing. I trained doing some interviews with smaller companies before this one, to be fully ready. It was my number one job at the time
The process was separated in 3 days, the first day, you have an interview with a Senior, the next day you have 2 interviews with 2 managers and the final day it is with 3 partners. Each interview is one hour long.
Because of the covid it was held online on Zoom.
Fast forward to the first interview day :
I joined at 10:56 for the interview starting at 11:00. The guy interviewing me is late by 8 minutes. He joins the call and start apologizing for his delay, we start some casual talking for 5 minutes, I present myself, he presents himself and then he leaves the conversation in the middle of a sentence. I wait 10 minutes, and then I receive a call on my phone from him, he tells me that he had a power shortage and couldn't join back the call and that we will make the call next week. I agree to have the call in 3 days.
I join back my friends on discord to explain them what happened, but in my head it's like “Shit happens, that's unfortunate, I have additional time to train myself
5 minutes later, I receive a call back from this interviewer telling me “Ok we can have the call now, I'm available” (Already 30 minutes are elapsed) (It's 11:30)
big mistake from my side, I agree, because in my head, I hope the interview will go until 12:30, so I hope he lets me the time to have a full interview.
I join back the call….Error, I cannot hear him, so he calls me back (with the phone on loudspeaker) and says that the interview will be held with our phone as speaker and the camera of our webcams. Quality of the sounds is awful, I cannot understand only half of what he's saying. I always ask him to repeat, he asks questions, I cannot hear everything.I ask him if he can improve his sounds quality, he avoids to answer. He seems stressed and in a hurry, so we start for two minutes and he says :”Ok let's jump into the business case”, I start the business case, he shows me some graphs and asks me to conclude findings base on those after 2-3 minutes of reading them.
Then when i start explaining my conclusions, he cut his camera, but because I can still hear him in his phone, I hear that he's not listening to me but speaking to a colleague during the whole time i was speaking. At this moment I fell really bad, I start to sweat (Keep in mind I was going out of university, and it was a prestigious company).
When he opens again the camera, he's still talking to his friend/colleague and says, ok I heard enough (15 minutes for a business case) and asks me If I have any questions on the company (It's 11:57), so i take the paper of questions i had prepared and I ask the first one, he answers quite fast. I start asking the second one, he cuts me and says “I have to go, I will let you know in one week if you pass to the second round”.
I hang out of the call , I feel so sad, wanna cry, I had the impression I had no opportunity to impress him. And the call lasted for 30 minutes instead of 1 hours.
Fast foward one week later :
The interviewer calls me and tells me that i wasn't good enough. I tell him on the phone that I had the impression that he didn't give me my chance, he felt embarrassed and says that he treated each applicant the same way. We hang out, I had the time to process so I don't feel bad to not be retained. In fact I didn't want to continue in the process
I had a manager recruiter that calls me to ask me how it went, I explain him how it went, how I was treated and he apologized a lot, saying it's not normal.
One of my friends got a similar position on the company, he did a burn out after 10 months. Happy I didn't go to this company with same back-steps.