The bulk of the 5+ hour interview process was actually very good, but this portion alone just left an overall bad taste:
As other candidates for this role have indicated, the case study and presentation portion of their interview process is flawed. Then again, who knows what they're ultimately trying to accomplish with it. I actually thought I had them figured out, in terms of believing I didn't fall for what seemed like a trick test.
You talk to someone acting as a Business Owner, who doesn't have answers to several of the (in some cases, very basic) questions most real business owners would have, you're then given 30 minutes to create an end all be all solution based on the information, and then present on that solution to a group acting as investors.
At a high level, the solutions to this case study were very obvious. However, the
missing information from the business owner was critical to an actual end all be all solution, which was the expectation laid out.
This is where I thought I had them figured out: Part of this is working around traps that are set to identify someone with a lack of integrity. Surely the guy behind the smarmy investor character isn't really expecting me to make up the numbers that were unknown to the business owner, or get me to commit to one proposed approach vs another without being allowed additional time to dig into some of that basic data. If this is intended to be the real life scenario described, with real money at stake, then real integrity is critical.
Surely it was all a trick, like the pretend investor coming in halfway through the presentation, or the one distracted by their laptop asking you to repeat what they missed. No problem. You work through and around those things, even when you have 30 minutes to prepare and 10 minutes to present.
What was concerning is, when it was all said and done, and they come out of that investor role, there really seemed to have been an expectation for you to invent the numbers that the business owner didn't have. Assuming this perception is accurate, no thank you. In the real world, I'm confident they would not expect or allow their employees to do this.
All in all I felt like some members of the group participating in this piece were likely young and inexperienced, or perhaps a different expectation could be set around what the point of this exercise really is.
Again, the rest of the 5+ hour interview process was just fine. They seem to put a lot of stock in this portion though and, as much as both the company and candidates invest in this process, hopefully they'll come around to tweaking it. I do think they're likely losing out on some great people because of it.