Bazaarvoice Interview Questions

Application

I applied online. I interviewed at Bazaarvoice.

Interview

It was the worse interview process I ever had. Extremely lengthy 4-5 days, I had to take 3 vacations days and half days off my current job to complete their interviews. The panel interview was with 5 different people and 2 hours long. The video system they use is not Zoom and so out of date and unheard of, it drained my macbook pro battery and crashed my computer 1.5 hours into the interview. They told me to do the presentation the final round and said everyone liked me and they exceptionally wanted to hire me. The final round presentation the 3 pages of paper had no instructions or clear expectations on what the presentation should be on. It said convince the brand to send x amount of units to the warehouse. I went above and beyond and worked days on my presentation and after I gave the demo to them, the hiring manager said they wanted something more casual like a conversation with the brand and not something too formal. But the 3 pages of guidelines said to "convince the brand to send you the product and units." It was so unfair and vague, a new applicant does not know your brand tone and how formal or informal you want a presentation. Most companies want top notch presentations and this company wanted a casual conversation with jokes instead. How is the applicant supposed to know that? I regret interviewing for this company I lost so many vacation days and they were so old fashioned and shady about everything. They don't even use zoom for virtual meets they use an unheard of video webpage looked like myspace. I am so glad I didn't join this company the universe had my back.

Application

I applied online. I interviewed at Bazaarvoice (Austin, TX (US)) in January 2021.

Interview

This was the most unprofessional interview process of my career. I interviewed with the recruiter in November 2020. He told me he would contact me by the end of the day with next steps. I never heard from him again, even after I sent a follow-up email.

Fast forward to January 2021, that's TWO MONTHS later and I received an email from the recruiter at 1:11 am wanting to urgently schedule me for second round interviews. He scheduled me for FOUR HOURS of consecutive interviews....I feel I do okay, but I hear nothing. Not even a canned rejection letter. It appears I have been ghosted....again.

Application

I applied online. I interviewed at Bazaarvoice.

Interview

The hiring manager was dismissive and judgemental. After I experienced two layoffs, she was uninterested although I was more than qualified for the job. Very judgemental considering the state of the world. At the end of the call, I asked questions about the role and the company. In the middle of asking a question, she cut me off and said she had another meeting and never offered to answer my questions via email. She also asked me to choose between sales and marketing as a passion. People have multiple passions in life.

Application

I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Bazaarvoice (Austin, TX (US)) in December 2020.

Interview

I was referred in by someone who works there. I got set up with a screening call which went well. Then I did a mock email to a client as an assignment from the recruiter. From there I was passed onto a manager for a phone interview. It felt a little off to me, like maybe he wasn't prepared or I just wasn't saying what he wanted to hear.

Application

I applied online. I interviewed at Bazaarvoice (Austin, TX (US)) in November 2020.

Interview

The interview was good but the definition of the role seemed to be a bit off. After speaking about it with the hiring manager, it was more of a Scrum role and a business software ownership role.

Application

I applied online. The process took 4+ weeks. I interviewed at Bazaarvoice (Austin, TX (US)) in July 2020.

Interview

Pretty typical interview process for a sales engineering type of role. Heard from a recruiter a week or two after applying online. Then the hiring manager. Then a colleague on the same team. Then a sales demo/presentation for several folks from sales and technology teams.

I thought the whole thing went pretty well. They kept the process moving and were pretty communicative about next steps, even as they passed me between a couple of different recruiting contacts.

All of the conversations I had were great. Answered all of my questions, really open and honest about the company and the relevant teams. Very casual and friendly opportunities to get to know each other via phone and video calls. Though I did feel like the calls were cut a little short sometimes (I think 45 mins is a good interview duration, but I like to ask a lot of questions).

The last step was a mock sales presentation, which is ubiquitous in the sales hiring process. They gave me a project brief to introduce the scenario, and unlike other companies I've interviewed with, the document was adequately descriptive, helpful, and included everything I needed to get started. But they also scheduled a call with the hiring manager to go over any questions and help me prepare; he gave me some good tips about my audience and what they would want to see, emphasizing that he wanted me to succeed. They also suggested a reasonable time limit (5 hours) for preparation, so I didn't feel like I was actually expected to do someone else's work for free, which is how this type of thing seems sometimes.

Demo day came, and I gave it my best shot. I dealt with a few technical hiccups, and maybe I failed to put all of my true personality into it that day, but the audience was patient, engaged, and supportive. They listened to my pitch, played their assigned roles, and gave really good feedback afterward. I would have loved to join that SC team, but in the end, the recruiter called the following week to let me know they had chosen a different candidate. No hard feelings.

Application

I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Bazaarvoice in June 2020.

Interview

Pretty standard process. Applied online and set up time to speak with their lead recruiter. I was very impressed and please with this conversation. One of the more knowledgable recruiters I have spoken with and I could tell he was very invested in his job. Convo went well and I was pretty much told I'd advance eon the spot.

2nd Round was with a leader in the Success org. Very conversational with no gotcha questions.

About 12 days passed and on a Sunday the recruiter reached out to give me some insight into what was going on. I appreciated the transparency but essentially it sounded like they did not have their stuff together and ended up giving preference to some internal candidates in the interview process and that they would have me interview for another team with open reqs. I was told to expect follow up the next week but that did not happen.

I ended up being ghosted or forgotten about, which was pretty disappointing considering the current state of affairs with Covid and unemployment.

Application

The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Bazaarvoice (Austin, TX (US)) in March 2019.

Interview

TLDR: The coding problems consist of classical Cracking The Coding Interview stuff and no single problem was overly difficult. But I would still recommend to properly prepare since it’s a different beast to solve these problems on a whiteboard - even if they are a rather easy if you are sitting at home on your couch with your favorite IDE. Furthermore, be prepared to cover _a lot_ of topics: The interviewers (most of them are very experienced) asked me questions that covered everything from low-level data structure and implementation stuff to design, scalability, QA, DevOps, development methodologies and leadership. Last but not least: The recruiter I worked with (Michael) did an outstanding job - he was very engaged and kept me informed about every step in the process.

Step 0: A recruiter got in touch with me on LinkedIn / initial call with the recruiter

The interview process consisted of 7 steps:

Step 1: Phone Interview with the Hiring Manager

A roughly 45 minutes long phone interview with the hiring manager. This was actually a little bit tricky since I interviewed for 2 different roles at the same time. That made the conversation until the end of the interview process a little bit less straight forward compared to the case where you know exactly which role you are applying for.

Step 2: Technical phone screen

A software engineer administered a coding challenge via CodePair. It started with a fairly easy tree construction / processing exercise. The interviewer then incrementally added more requirements and asked some behavioral question in the end.

Step 3 (on-site): 1 hour whiteboard coding session

Two software engineers conducted a 1-hour whiteboard coding session that covered basic data structure stuff. While it was not too difficult, you should be confident writing compilable code on a whiteboard.

Step 4 (on-site): 1 hour lunch with the hiring manager

A (obviously) less technical session without any whiteboarding. Gave both me and the hiring manager a chance to talk in more detail about both roles. The hiring manager also asked a lot of process related questions: Which development methodology (e.g. Scrum vs Kanban) do I prefer and why? What is my take on TDD? Stuff like this.

Step 5 (on-site): 1 hour whiteboard system design session

One software engineer and a DevOps manager conducted a 1-hour whiteboard system design session. The task was to design a scalable web application. Should not be too difficult if you have done that before.

Step 6 (on-site): 1 hour DevOps / QA Q&A session

A 1 hour conversation with two DevOps / QA engineers. Boy, I don’t even recall how many topics we touched. Felt like we talked about every single topic you can discuss about in software engineering world.

Step 7 (on-site): 1 hour whiteboard coding session

Ironically, the initial task (some in-place string manipulation stuff) was the easiest problem I was given so far. But I made the mistake to define my test cases only as set of parameters (I did not write down the expected values). The result was that I had to keep track of two different things while manually debugging my code: What should the algorithm do vs. what does the algorithm do. This threw me off big time and I was not able to fully recover from my brain freeze (since at this time I did not really see the root cause). So I just struggled through it until the end.

Interview

There was a written exam and an online interview followed by a phone interview and then an onsite visit to present a plan to a round table of team members and managers who were able to ask questions

Interview

1. Phone - convo with recruiter.
2. Phone - technical interview (remote coding was involved).
3. On-site - four 1-on-1, 45-minute technical interviews with staff/senior engineers and a 2-on-1 lunch interview with management.
4. Phone - negotiations with recruiter.