This was a unique and very bizarre method of interviewing candidates.
I got a quick 2 minute conversation on the phone and was offered to come in to a group interview.
It was in their office at Surry Hills at 5pm on a weekday, a strange choice of time.
I arrived with approximately 8 other people for the PM role and 1 other person for a different role. Half the people there had no idea it was a group interview, and I could tell none of them had read the glassdoor reviews as none of them expected a 3 minute speech to be asked of them later on.
Started with a quick introduction to some members of the 4Mation team. It was super awkward, basically they got us walking around and forcing small talk with a few members of the team for 5-10 minutes.
Then we did a quick walk through tour of the office which was pretty sweet, I must say I really liked their office environment. During the walk-through I noticed that all the staff were still working and this was around 5:15pm, a nearly full office. I also noticed every single person there was Caucasian aside from the Asian guy who runs the place, it was then that I also noticed that everyone that was being interviewed was Asian. Perhaps they are deciding to do a bit of diversity hiring? Might be a coincidence.
After the run through we are sat down to hear a speech about 4Mation from a guy who owns the company, and this is where we are first told that we have a 3 minute speech to give after his presentation is done.
The questions were:
1) Who are you, and what can you bring to the 4Mation team?
2) Why do you want to work at 4Mation?
3) (Optional) What is a project that you are most proud of?
I enjoyed the speech because public speaking is something I am very good at, whilst every other candidate that was giving a speech was a nervous wreck. People fidgeting out of nerves, not speaking loud enough, not answering the question etc. You could see a lot of the candidates were stressed about this.
The guys that are marking let the group know: "Don't worry if you don't do so well, we are not marking you on your presentation" - it's total nonsense, they are marking on your ability to present and speak 100%. If you are applying for a PM role, you should be able to speak comfortably.
That was the end of the group session, and I was followed up with the next day via phone call and was asked if I could do a small project for the company as part of the Round 2 interview process. Each candidate is given 48hrs after receiving E-mail instructions regarding the project task. It was Friday afternoon and I was asked to do it over the weekend if possible, which I had no issue with doing.
The project was:
"Project Managers at 4mation wear a few different hats. One of the hats they wear is that of a Business Analyst, constantly working with clients to identify problems and inefficiencies in order to provide recommendations and solutions.
This assessment is designed to gain an understanding of the business analysis skills and ideas that our Project Manager candidates can generate in order to enhance a website.
We would like you to review this (****WEBSITE*****) and provide three ideas for feature
improvements. There are no restrictions on budget or time for execution of the ideas, so be creative!
Remember that each idea needs to benefit the end customer or the company - preferably both!
FORMAT: 4Mation works exclusively in JIRA and Confluence, however any content that can be read is acceptable
Must have: Feature name, exec summary, benefits
Should have: User Stories, Acceptance Criteria, Dependencies, Assumptions"
I am not an Agile Project Manager, so I'm not sure why I even got into the interview stage when I made it clear that I have only done a few years of waterfall based projects.
This was the first time I've done project documentation with user stories, epics and features etc. so it's no surprise I didn't advance beyond this stage in the interview process.
Rob and Co. were really nice guys, even if the interview format was bizarre. It looked like a great place to work!