Should have eaten my Wheaties this morning

This morning’s interview with the world’s largest software company was one of the more humbling experiences of my second year at Kenan-Flagler. The interviewer began by telling me about her background, which includes an MBA from Kenan-Flagler, a couple of years at a big name consulting firm, and a walkthrough of the various positions she has held and products she has launched at the company over the years.

 

Her questions included what I believe are the major challenges facing a software testing organization such as the one I worked on at AOL, what changes I would make to AOL with everything I have learned at Kenan-Flagler and from my summer internship, she also asked for a ninety second overview of my summer internship. As I was struggling to form words with my mouth, I couldn’t help getting the impression that she was not impressed with my answers.

 

One of the requirements of the interview was for the interviewee to tell the interviewer what divisions of the company he wants to work for. For me the choice is obviously the company’s online division (content portal, internet services, search, online marketing) and coincidentally this is the division she is about to transfer into starting next week. I spent the plurality of my time answering her last question which was if I were to put together a “first 90 day” plan for the online division, what would I recommend in terms of strategic partners, business opportunities, or product changes to pursue. She then handed me a blank piece of paper and asked me to sketch out the high level bullet points of a presentation I would put together.

 

Toward the end of the interview, she told me that the online division is one of the harder groups to get into because there are few openings. I was tempted to try to score a bonus by telling her it’s the division they need to invest the most in and fire off some rehearsed factoids that I forced myself to memorize, but I decided against it.

 

I am a bit disappointed that I didn’t do any better but I wouldn’t say the interview was a waste of 301 bid points because looking back, I got two important pieces of information from it. I had chosen the online division not only because it’s the division I feel most qualified for given my interests and work experience, but also because my industry knowledge tells me this is an area that’s most critical to that company’s future. The interviewer telling me there are few openings tells me either my research is wrong or it was a polite way of telling me I won’t be getting a second round. And while I was attempting to answer her question about putting together a plan for the online division, I came up with something on the spot that I thought was really quite brilliant. While I was explaining this to her, for the first and only time during the interview, she looked at me like I had brain in my head. I am not going to share with you what this idea is, but I am going to do some research on this and coyly bring it up the next time I interview with another company in the same industry. And I should do this soon because knowing the history of the company I interviewed with this morning, my interviewer is probably going to steal my idea as her own.