I applied to an opening right after it was posted and was contacted for a first round interview a few days later. The first interview went great, and I was assured that I was moving to the second round. 1. The interviewers had their cameras off on Teams which was unexpected and made it difficult for me to keep a conversation flowing when I can’t see expressions or when someone is about to talk. 2. When discussing a situation from my previous role about working with build-to numbers in accounts, the interviewer says nothing except “I don’t get it. why couldn’t your clients just do this themselves?” coming off as if what I did wasn’t significant, instead of trying to understand the situation. One guy was more understanding than the other but that was discouraging. 3. I introduced myself at the beginning, gave an overview of my resume and prior experience, discussed my major in college and why I chose sales, my motivations, and why I felt Grainger’s values aligned with my career goals, and then was asked “what are you really passionate about?” after my pitch. So I guess this implied my motivations and career goals didn’t seem passionate enough for Grainger. 4. I didn’t find it weird that I was asked about why I had worked in different cities on my resume, but I got the feeling that they seemed skeptical of me because of that. Again, most of this experience would’ve been more humanized had I just been able to see a face instead of talking to a black screen. I could have interpreted some of these responses the wrong way. To add, I don’t have a ton of sales experience considering my experience was in established, contracted accounts. I’ve never had a quota to hit so I really couldn’t answer behavioral questions about how those at all. This is a true sales role. The recruiter told me there were 20-30 accounts I would be responsible of and there were two openings in the area, yet the interviewers told me there are 60-80 accounts for one rep. So when I mentioned the number of accounts to the interviewers I sounded very misinformed. Finally, my second interview wasn’t until weeks later so this entire process took over a month with no notice that I didn’t get an offer. Every person in the process was hard to get a hold of just like any corporation. I’m the last person to blame others and I take some responsibility for this failure considering I wasn’t prepared to answer questions with specific details about quotas and margins from not having a lot of experience. Like I stated earlier, this is a true sales position. In my opinion the questions were difficult considering the base pay offered, but they aren’t difficult if you have the experience. If you don’t have that, your best bet is to get a referral to get in with this company as it seems that’s how many people started. I hope this helped someone and I definitely learned from this. It’s not the place for me.
