Basic recruiter call (who contacted me first on LinkedIn), followed by hiring manager call, then a case study, and then I become uninterested in the job so idk what comes after lol.
First 2 parts of this were pretty simple and straight to the point (recruiter call, hiring manager call), but the case study was not my thing at all. I could see how a case study could be needed for more technical roles, but I strongly believe case studies are not a good indication or test for project/program managers and that already caught me off guard when the recruiter vocalized it was the next step in the interview process, but I agreed to do it anyway. I've literally never had to do a case study in my 10 years of experience when interviewing, maybe I'm just lucky, I dunno. Additionally the case study was me analyzing 20+ graphs -- I was not told the prompt beforehand so this was all live, and I had about 40 minutes on the call to talk through it as the first 15 minutes were introductions and a couple behavioral questions from the hiring panel and I had 5 minutes at the end to ask them questions. I found this difficult and unproductive because the graphs were on a google doc which I had to keep scrolling up and down through to look at the data; I was unclear if I was supposed to be comparing/contrasting the different graphs or what. I was getting unclear guidance from the interviewers besides just telling me to explain the trends of the data. I had barely any time to even digest what I was looking at across these 20+ graphs before they started asking questions and telling me to document what I'm observing (also the graphs were incredibly tiny on the document, I could barely read them). Towards the end I become frustrated because I felt like this was a waste of my time and told the interview panel nothing about how I manage projects/programs, how I interact with stakeholders, how I plan things, how I work with vendors, how I create and manage processes, etc.... literally ANYTHING about my previous 10 years of experience. I understand analyzing data is/could be an important part of a program manager's role but that case study didn't feel like it was setup to get meaningful input about a candidate with the way it was laid out, the timeframe given, and the questions asked.
Additionally, I had about 5 minutes to ask questions at the end (to 2 interviews I had not met yet in the process. I had no understanding of really what they do on the team or what their teams or day to day looks like - they also turned their cameras off the whole time besides the introductions in the beginning where they basically just said their title and how long they had been at Ramp). One question I asked I was told "it's on the Ramp website" and then sent the link on the zoom. I was moreso wanting the interviewer to outline details around the process and the teams involvement of what I asked, not so much a black and white answer that was on the website. Felt very condescending, whether it was meant to be or not.
I'm personally someone that is a top performer at any team I'm on, but I do TERRIBLE when put on the spot for assessments like this, hence why I think assessments for non-technical roles are pretty flawed. I realize they want to see how candidates think on their feet, but I actually don't think that's a real indication of how someone would perform day to day in a job.
I realized if I was expected to analyze data like this on the spot and immediately give my analysis in 3 minutes within the job, this would probably not be the right role for me anyway, which is fine. Everyone on the panel also seemed stressed/tired and even basically said so themselves in the beginning. I ended the call and was like yep that was not for me, which is all good!! Sometimes it's like that.