The phone call

On Friday, I had the phone interview that I have been anticipating for the past two and a half weeks. This was the interview with an internet content company that I very much want to work for.

 

It went relatively well. It was suppose to begin at 1:15 and last anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes. One of the career counselors at the Career Management Center was nice enough to let me use his office, which was where I was starting at 1pm. The phone didn't ring until 1:20. The interviewer began by telling me his experience at the company (he's been there for 5 months), talked about what my role would entail, and asked me to do my resume walk. He stopped at about five minutes into the phone call and said he had to vacate the conference room he was in and would call me back from a new location.

 

He called me back pretty quickly and allowed me to finish my resume walk. His first question was to talk about a product that I have used that is designed poorly. I was asked almost the exact same question a year ago when I had my phone interview for a finance internship with the world’s largest software company. Yet for whatever reason, I didn’t anticipate it and took me quite a while to come up with a product to talk about. His second question was one I had anticipated but yet had no way to prepare for. It was a brain teaser question.

 

I had no clue as to how to begin to answer the brain teaser question. I thought about how ironic my situation was, that I had spent hours reading blogs about this industry, read up on everything I could find about the company, even looked at the PowerPoint deck of the presentation its chief financial officer gave at a recent analyst meeting, yet I was going to blow the interview because of a stupid brain teaser question. But I quickly regained my composure and began to verbalize my logic and thinking. By the time I was done answering it, I would say I got anywhere from 60 to 85% of the puzzle, good enough for a P (pass).

 

The interviewer then allowed me to ask two questions before he ended the interview. He said he would give his feedback and I will hear something this week. The phone call (not including the time when he had to switch rooms) lasted a bit more than 30 minutes. I walked away thinking I did well enough to get the next round but it was by no means a slam dunk. The more I think about it, the more I don’t like the way I answered the “‘poorly designed” question. My answer was not so much about anything that was poorly designed but more about what I don’t like about the product and how I would change it.

 

Even though this phone interview is probably the most exciting thing that has happened to my job search this school year, I still haven’t told too many people about it. I don’t particularly want a bunch of well meaning people constantly coming up to me and asking for updates. I am also going to continue to refrain from hinting on this blog as to what company this is. But have no fear, when the time is right (which I define as either I get invited to a company visit or receive a rejection email) I will adequately leave enough hints for you to figure out what company this is. Perhaps then you will understand why this phone interview was such a big deal.