I interviewed at Penguin Random House (New York, NY) in Apr 2017
Interview
I was called by a recruiter for a phone interview with no warning. It was the middle of the work day for me so I had to rush out of my office to take the call and was caught completely off guard. Then later there was an in-person interview with the recruiter and an interview with the hiring manager. Then another interview with a more senior person and then I was asked to come in again for another round of interviews - it would have been the fifth interview- but I took myself out of the running. The whole hiring process had a lot of steps and seemed very corporate and formal.
HR - please don't call without warning! It was very difficult for me to manage all the spontanous calls from HR with my full time job.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Penguin Random House (Londen, Engeland) in Jul 2017
Interview
I was emailed to do a video interview which was four questions long. I then was emailed again regarding an in person interview. I had the in person interview and the interviewer was very friendly
I applied online. I interviewed at Penguin Random House (Toronto, ON)
Interview
I was called in for an interview quite promptly after the deadline had elapsed which is always appreciated. However, rather than the usual phone screening, the interview went straight to a panel of three people. They asked me four or so very general questions that I had to come up with specific examples for in order to make the questions make any sense (for example, they asked me: how would I approach marketing based on a title's metadata -- if you know publishing, this is kind of a pointless question for reasons I won't get into here).
Although I answered all the questions well, they did not invite me to the next round of interviews because they felt my skills were too similar to the ones already possessed by the team.
I found that response strange because if their team truly had my skills, they wouldn't be in the situation they are currently (namely, complete obscurity to the Canadian reading public).
Too bad -- they are doing some interesting things, but perhaps not enough.
Interview questions [4]
Question 1
How would you approach creating a marketing campaign out of a TI (aka Title Information )?