The interview process is very long and exhausting. In total, it is made up of 4 rounds, each of them being longer than the previous one. In the beginning, I was approached by a recruiter on LinkedIn and had my first 20-minute phone call with her around a week later. That call was the most "humane" one. At the end, she explained to me how the following steps would look like. already sounded very challenging since it became clear that a lot of preparation would be needed. 2 webex interviews followed where they basically ask you the same questions over and over again. You need to know a lot about Gartner, and when it comes to answering questions about yourself, you need to follow the STAR structure. On the day of my final interview, I was flown to one of their main offices. There, I first had a 30-minute conversation with one of their AM's. That woman left a rather brainwashed impression on me, since a lot of what she said was 1:1 out of the motivational marketing material for Gartner employees. Also, it became crystal clear for who they look: money-driven people who blindly follow processes and don't question things. Also, they seem to look out for extraverted people, who never stop asking questions with a weirdly exaggerated enthusiasm (very American, really odd in a European environment though). The panel interview that followed was the thing that prevented me from getting the job. Even though they test your skills with a mock sales call, and try to find out how knowledgeable you are about Gartner, they lay an even greater emphasis on their behavioral based questions where they test whether you have all their 6 traits. Because I had answered the exact same questions in the 2 interviews before, I found it pretty dumb that I, once again, had to go through this step. Anyway. Because I was so tired of the entire process already, and because I had already given them the answers in previous interviews, I missed on following the exact (STAR) answering scheme. I think I did a pretty good job at the sales call and the knowledge part, but was not hired for that reason.
My advice for the recruiting staff would be to set a greater emphasis on the actual tasks and not the blind following of a weird procedure. Especially when I'm asked to answer questions about myself, I would appreciate to be given a little more leeway for actually demonstrating WHO I am, and not just be tested if I'm capable of following your made-up process. There's a human voice missing in this whole process. And tbh, I'm pretty glad I didn't get the role because if THAT is how they treat you in the hiring process, I'm not keen on finding out how they'll treat you as an employee (probably just as a dispensable working-bee, solely measured by their numbers).