A recruiter from Medallia reached out to me on LinkedIn and we set up a time to talk. The process was very quick overall and the recruiters were in touch with me throughout the process.
There was one video round where we talked about the work experience, why medallia and general questions.
Then came the Medallia Challenge Round for which I was given 48 hours to complete and then present it to a panel of 2 people over a video call. I thought I did fairly well on the challenge and the presentation and answering the Q&A.
I got a call from the recruiter a couple of days later that they will not be moving forward with me. On asking for the feedback, they said it seems like you didn't understand the point of "XXX" in the challenge.
Here is the problem:
a) The challenge is very high-level and expect you to assume certain things. The interviewers didn't bother to check the appendices in which I called out the assumptions.
b) The challenge specified a certain time-period that i had to follow but the interviewer kept insisting that is too long (again this was mentioned in the assumptions).
c) The challenge clearly stated that you can make any assumptions as they don't expect you to know the implementation methodology but the interviewer was bothered that certain things were not normal to their projects. (Again, the assumptions explained everything).
As mentioned in some other reviews, I feel that the overall challenge is not objective as the challenge clearly mentions that you can assume anything to fit your narrative and your goal is to do this and this. There are several ways to tackle the problem in the challenge. But, the interviewers expect you to do a particular thing in a particular way which comes down to all your assumptions aligning with what the interviewers want to see. Clearly, however good you defend your assumptions and explain it to the interviewers they don't seem to be objective about the skillsets they are supposed to test during the challenge.
I think Medallia should consider training their interviewers on how to be objective during the interview or modify the challenge to give more details so the candidate doesn't have to make assumptions that clearly are not read by the interviewers.
