The process is extensive and lasted 2 months.
1) Screening call with recruiter. Questions were pretty basic for the role.
2) Interview with Hiring Manager. Asked specific questions about my experience and how I thought about certain types of problems and systems.
3) Presentation. 20 min plus 10 min Q&A to someone who would be a peer. Business case which was essentially problem solving for their actual business need, which felt like there was a strong possibility that they would take my plan/ideas if they liked them and didn't hire me, but that's standard with any company requiring a presentation, paper, or project. The recruiter said to not spend more than an hour on it, but the complexity of the case required several hours to build it out.
4) Panel interviews, 3 back to back with cross functional peers. They asked about how I have worked with their function in the past and how I would approach different issues. One was an AI fluency interview, which I talk about below.
5) Recruiter call, pre-final interview. Prepped for the final zoom call and explained the process on their end of selecting between final applicants after the last interview. Once they have their chosen candidate, it goes to the founders for final approval.
6) Final interview. The interviewer was a direct report of one of the founders, and it was a complete 180 from all the other interviews. He didn't seem to have told anyone else what he was actually looking for in filling the role. The entire interview, nothing jived at all. I felt like I was in the wrong call. Everything I had talked about in the other interviews with the rest of the team, hiring manager, and with the recruiter in terms of how I would run the program and my assessment of their program needs over the prior 7 weeks, including the literal powerpoint I submitted and presented to them? Nope, not what he wanted AT ALL. He didn't even like the questions I had for him at the end of the interview, and instead he changed my questions to something totally different and then answered the questions I didn't ask. Meanwhile, my question was not answered. He was cordial but it was a complete disconnect. After I'd answer a question, he would tell me how he would have preferred I had answered based on information I could not have known ahead of time about the inner workings of their company and what he was actually wanting the person in this role to do. I have 15+ years of experience and have interviewed/hired 200+ people in my career, so I'm no stranger to the industry, this type of role, or the hiring process at a fintech. I almost emailed the recruiter immediately to withdraw, but a colleague of mine thought it might be a test to see how I'd respond to the situation (which also made me want to withdraw, since I don't believe in playing games with people in the interview process) but I decided to wait and see. It was not a test, it was just a total lack of communication of how he wanted to build this program. When the recruiter emailed me to say they weren't moving forward with me, I was not at all surprised and my family was relieved, given the experience I'd had on the last call.
