Excessively long interview process with multiple stages drawn out over a month. They were filling a role that they hadn't managed to fill in months of interviews. Quite disorganised and recruiter would lose contact for long periods. Interviewers were disparaging about London office as being somewhat of an outpost.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Samsara (London, England) in Nov 2024
Interview
1:1 with hiring manager, followed by 4 hours with a panel, and a questionable take home case study. The interviewers were kind and respectful. The recruitment team however were appalling. Recruitment is outsourced to India, it was a nightmare to get interviews scheduled. I had to follow up several times and wait days for a reply. There was no prep material or a candidate pack provided. Putting candidates through 5 interviews without any prep material is brutal and unprofessional on their part. After all this, I got a generic rejection email, with typos. I would have left a positive review if it wasn’t for the overall poor candidate experience.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Tell me about a time you managed adoption, usability and time to market
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Samsara (Seattle, WA) in Sep 2024
Interview
I started with a recruiter screening and then a 45 minute behavioral interview with the hiring manager. I then completed two writing exercises (2 and 3 pages) and, then 4 more rounds of interviews, 3 behavioral and one case. Hard to rate the difficult here - behavioral interviews are open to interpretation but nothing too surprising. Case interview was challenging but fun.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Tell me about a time when you used customer input/feedback to improve a product?
I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Samsara in May 2024
Interview
Process was an initial recruiter screen, 1:1 with the hiring manager, a 1 week take home HW assignment, 3 follow-up case interviews, and 1 final VP interview. They include a questionable take home assignment, where you have a full week to create a detailed product vision and requirements doc for one of their product teams. It felt a bit unethical, given that you're spending time working on materials that could help their business (and no one really ever looked at the completed assignment.)
Also, entire 5 person interview panel was white dudes.
Samsara aims to provide a great candidate experience, so we are disappointed to hear we missed this opportunity with you. Thank you for taking the time to provide valuable feedback. We are working with our hiring teams to ensure this is improved.
