Contacted by a recruiter in late February and set up a phone screen where basic background and behavioral questions were asked. Then scheduled a first round of interviews with engineers and director of talent. I was asked some basic coding questions and system design for a simple backend. Be sure to come prepared with examples for the behavioral questions regarding Alma’s core values listed in their slides. Then a final round of interview with the hiring manager and product managers/designers to have a technical deep dive into your best projects and experience working with cross-functional teams. Overall the process is smooth, transparent and sympathetic and the recruiter did an awesome job of following up and providing updates. Alma places a lot of emphasis on the equity of judging every candidate by the same criteria, thus giving the best candidate and interviewing experience. They also try to set up the candidates not only for success in the interviews but also when working for the company if selected.

Endless. You have to have several conversations with people who will not be on your team before they even begin to assess your skills. It takes them 2+ weeks to schedule meetings in between each round. Their calendars must be filled to the brim. Conversations with managers ominously referenced frequent conflict and lack of a strong culture. They strung me along for over 6 weeks, making me attend 7 different interviews with 10 individual employees. Processes like this leave me wondering how these people find time to actually do their work. After all this they emailed to tell me that they went with someone else. Then a week later they reposted the position. Really left me with the impression that this company is deeply dysfunctional, disorganized, doesn't respect people's time and doesn't know what they really want. All along the way they smiled in my face and insisted they cared so much about my mental health and well being, but they way they went about this process felt so dishonest, disrespectful, and lacking compassion. The interview itself was just basic technical questions, not that difficult. It shouldn't take a dozen conversations to figure out if you like someone. Especially when you claim your process is ~so objective~ and ~free of bias~ The definition of fake nice toxic positivity. I wouldn't ever apply here again.