Multiple interview assignments?
Contributor 
Hi Everyone,
I'm helping a mentee through the hiring process for an entry level CSM position and am perplexed and frankly insulted by the hiring practices at this company. In general I am pretty against take home assignments unless they are either generic topics looking to gain insight into thought process or given with a significant amounts actual data about the company and backstory to the assignment. In my mind the goal of an assignment is either to gain understanding on intelligence capacity or experience with customer success, not industry or product experience about your company.
In this case the first assignment was neither, it was (loosely) "based on our product what would you do for a renewal call." I find assignments like this to be insulting to the interviewee and really tells you nothing about the person. You are hiring this person and will give them the ingredients and training they will need to accomplish their job, don't ask them to build a CS playbook from scratch knowing little to nothing about your environment or industry in their spare time.
She finished that round but has now been given a more intense version of the same assignment which includes logging into a demo account for her to sort out and multiple scenarios based around the same questions before. The scenarios also have multiple parts that includes using their product like an end user and then playing the part of the CSM but there may be a huge gap in time for the process to even work!
My gut feeling is that this lazy interviewing tactic is a huge red flag for toxic leadership but maybe I'm off. This is a mid-size company with a decent valuation, this is not a Google size deal.
I'm inclined to tell her to pass but would love to hear your thoughts.
I'm helping a mentee through the hiring process for an entry level CSM position and am perplexed and frankly insulted by the hiring practices at this company. In general I am pretty against take home assignments unless they are either generic topics looking to gain insight into thought process or given with a significant amounts actual data about the company and backstory to the assignment. In my mind the goal of an assignment is either to gain understanding on intelligence capacity or experience with customer success, not industry or product experience about your company.
In this case the first assignment was neither, it was (loosely) "based on our product what would you do for a renewal call." I find assignments like this to be insulting to the interviewee and really tells you nothing about the person. You are hiring this person and will give them the ingredients and training they will need to accomplish their job, don't ask them to build a CS playbook from scratch knowing little to nothing about your environment or industry in their spare time.
She finished that round but has now been given a more intense version of the same assignment which includes logging into a demo account for her to sort out and multiple scenarios based around the same questions before. The scenarios also have multiple parts that includes using their product like an end user and then playing the part of the CSM but there may be a huge gap in time for the process to even work!
My gut feeling is that this lazy interviewing tactic is a huge red flag for toxic leadership but maybe I'm off. This is a mid-size company with a decent valuation, this is not a Google size deal.
I'm inclined to tell her to pass but would love to hear your thoughts.