I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Visto (New York, NY)
Interview
1st Round was an easy video chat with internal recruiter, 2nd round was a video chat with hiring manager followed by what was supposed to be a 3rd round assessment.
What instead happened - > was a 1 week + delay in being sent the assessment, with no note from HR on what was going on, except that I was told randomly on a Friday afternoon sorry for the delay - hiring manager was out on vacation and we'll follow up next week with the assessment. Ok, sure thing - sounds great.
But what happened next a few hours later was that I was given a multi-page assessment on a Friday evening at 7pm and expected to turn it in on Monday morning first thing.
What an absolute terrible mismanagement of the situation by all parties and faulty communication all around.
I immediately made sure both the hiring manager and HR knew this was wildly unrealistic and unprofessional and I considered this Strikes 1,2, and 3 all at once with the absolute ineptitude shown off by this company.
I told them upon receipt of my email that I was withdrawing my application for the position as I don't have time to deal with companies that don't have respect for candidates time and have unrealistic expectations.
If you see a company make their problems, your problems because of something they did wrong or mismanaged as part of the interview process? RUN THE OTHER WAY.
Thank god I dodged this bullet - and I hope my telling this story can help others that are smart Accountants do the same.
Massive Red Flags here people - there's better jobs out there for us, and you can for sure get them - no need to deal with or work in this dysfunction at Collective on the Accounting side.
To the people at Collective who I hope read this?
You deserve to lose quality candidates until you fix your processes internally or work to properly train your internal staff + HR/Talent Acquisition folks.
Thanks!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions on taxes prepared in your history, check their website - it features tons of S-Corp mentions, so know that.
As well as questions on your background, all standard interview stuff: Strengths/Weaknesses, why our company, what are you looking for in your next job...etc...all easy items that if you have interviewed at all recently outside of the tax items they focus on, you will have answered it all before.
I went to the office. I met a few people. They asked a bunch of questions. It was okay. The company no longer exists, so I'm glad I turned down the offer.
I applied through a staffing agency. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Visto (Bengaluru) in Aug 2017
Interview
Cleared all the 5 rounds and asked to submit documents for offer letter. But offer letter was never released and after one and half month of continuous follow-up, they apologized by saying the Hiring is a freeze.
All the rounds (total of 5) happened on the very same day in their Bangalore office. The questions were really very good and difficult level. The interviewers were really intelligent people. They covered almost all the concepts: Data Structures, Java OOPs concepts, Java Collections, String Problems, Recursion, SQL, Linux fundamentals, AWS basics. I cleared all the rounds and were asked to submit the relevant documents for releasing the offer letter and I did that the very same day.
But no offer letter gets released and after repeated email at two weeks interval, everytime, we get a reply that they will need more two weeks to get the offer approved.
Finally, after one and a half, I was informed that the Hiring is freeze and I was asked to look for other alternatives.
Completely unprofessional HR behavior and a time waste for the candidate and their tech team who took interviews.
Request you to not attend this company for the job change.
There might be budget problem from their end as I am already getting high pay in my current company. But the pay was clearly mentioned to them before process initiation. If you don't have money, please don't waste candidate time.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. Binary tree problems.
2. LinkedList problems.
3. Java OOPs concepts
4. Java Collections behavior
5. SQL Join Queries and complex Aggregate functions
6. String Problems
7. Recursion Algorithm problems.
For all the questions, I was asked to write the code on paper.
I don't know why they conduct interviews if they never wished to give the offer.