My interview process at Persado was overwhelmingly positive. Frank, my recruiter, found me on LinkedIn and scheduled time to discuss the position and my potential fit over the phone. He was polite, friendly, professional and enthusiastic, as well as transparent about the interview process, hiring timeline, compensation range and benefits package right from our first discussion. Frank worked tirelessly to keep the process moving quickly despite my having thrown a wrench in the process by leaving the country for a week between the last two phases of the interview process. The entire process consisted of ~5.5 hours of phone/video interviews and assessments, and took just over a month from start to finish.
While the process was intense and the required numerical assessment and business case felt intimidating at first, I felt entirely supported and encouraged throughout the process. While you must pass to proceed to next steps, the expectation is not that you get everything 100% right on the first try, but rather that you can share your thought process and communicate effectively as you work through your solutions. A breakdown of the process and details of the required assessments are below.
ROUND 1
- Initial phone screen with recruiter (30m)
- Self-administered timed numerical assessment (30m).
ROUND 2
- Video interview with hiring manager/Director of Project Manager (1h)
- Video interview with Head of Project Management (1h)
ROUND 3
- Prep phone call with recruiter (30m)
- Business case exam, proctored by Persado data scientist (1h)
- Video Interview with Vice President of Project Management (1h)
NUMERICAL ASSESSMENT - This consisted of ~15 multiple choice, story problem style math questions. You might be shown a graph or a chart, and be asked to interpret the data, or asked to make simple calculations. You will need a very basic understanding of math and marketing metrics to easily pass this. There are plenty of practice exams out there, and my recruiter even provided me with a few links to similar exams so I could get comfortable with the format. Pro tip: if something is feeling challenging and you are not able to easily answer within a minute, move on. If you waste your time answering one question that you may or may not get right, you risk the test ending when your time is up, prior to completion. Any answer not given is one missed.
PROCTORED BUSINESS CASE - This was fully explained by my recruiter and I received a prep call with him so that I could ask any questions I had prior. A few minutes before my scheduled business case, I received a raw data set sent via email showing results from an experiment (KPIs of variants as well as a control) as well as a list of questions. I was also provided some formulas that showed how Persado calculates KPIs, like ROI, uplift, etc. At the time of my exam, I had a short video discussion with a data scientist who designed the exam, and he explained the format in more depth and was also available for questions. I was then given access to a Google Sheet that I was allowed to manipulate, organize, add columns, formulas, etc. and use to provide my answers and show my work. After the time ended, the data scientist went through the questions and asked for my answers, as well as explanations about how I reached those answers, and a few "curveball" questions. These curveballs weren't really tricky, so much as they were designed to see if I could understand, interpret and communicate my findings, and even provide alternative views or answers given the context of the problems I was solving for my "client."
