Screening call from HR, followed by 60-minute panel interview, 30-minute one-on-one interview with a foreign-based counterpart, and then (having passed the first set) a final 60-minute panel interview with senior leadership — all over Zoom. Generally, I thought the process was well organized, but to a fault. The interview questions were entirely scripted, lengthy, and largely the same across all three interviews. When I asked one interviewer to repeat an element of a question, they replied by saying “Yeah, you might want to write it down because in TNC style we have three questions in one.” Yikes. In my mind: why don’t you start with one question and see where our conversation takes us? I don’t think I was ever asked a follow-up question about any of my responses and it made me wonder why I couldn’t have just given responses in writing. I could tell that the non-U.S. based interviewer found the process stilted and inorganic (as did I). To date, I’ve never been in an interview (on either end of the table) that has felt so bureaucratic. To top it off, when I was told to expect a decision within a week, I reached out to the HR contact after two weeks checking in and asking about whether it made sense to apply to other TNC roles, it then took another 2 weeks to simply get a response and tell me I wasn’t selected. Oh, and another month after that, I got another form letter saying a decision had been made and wasn’t selected (phrased in such a way that it was intended to be news). Overall, the process was a turnoff and, much like their questions, just made me feel a line item in a list. Advice to TNC: ask meaningful, tailored questions and express genuine interest in your candidates. Going through a checklist of questions gives no indication to prospective employees that you are interested unique skills or background they can bring to the table. And remember, many applicants are also donors.

Straightforward and fair questions. It was a group interview with five people. Informal questions and not structured. Very comfortable with the pace of questions, the subject (of course focused on environmental issues), the personalities of those in the interview and just in general.