First there was a phone call making sure that my personality fit the bill. After this, I was assigned the candidate exercise. The exercise took me around 20 hours to complete, which was very difficult to manage being a parent and having a full-time job. I found it to be somewhat rewarding in itself, however, I will never go through a process like this again. Perhaps my thoughts on this would be different should I have gotten the position, however it was a lot of effort to put into something and just receiving a no. I felt like I could have at least gotten a Starbucks gift card for all of that work! Furthermore, I question whether or not this was truly an interview process. To me, it seemed like a way for the company to perform a free R&D project. This seemed especially true since my title was R&D Candidate on my Veeva Quality Vault Access. It simply wasn't worth the time and effort and in the end, provided me with a lesson to avoid time consuming interviews like this. A simple test should have sufficed. Instead, I was given access to the Quality Vault. Not only did I have to learn the Quality Vault, I had to provide a demo to a "company" (roles played by hiring team), I had to create a presentation, and give a data migration phased plan on how to achieve their goals. What did I get out of this in the end? I learned quality vault. What did they get from it? Potentially, marketing research, slide show and presentation ideas, free labor.
