CNBC Interview Questions
& Process

It was a long interview process. I had a couple of phone chats before the last interview, but the recruiters were great with communication. The interview itself went well - the editor was really nice and asked questions clearly. They also made an effort to learn about me, which was nice since not all interviews are like that.

It was a multi-stage interview. First, an HR call where they really drilled down on salary expectations. Then, a writing test, followed by a first-round interview. When I got there, the interviewers were super friendly and made me feel really comfortable. They asked a mix of STAR method questions and questions about my journalism experience. They didn't really discuss next steps, which made me think they weren't super interested. Over two weeks later, I was told they were reconsidering the role internally and weren't hiring for it anymore. It would've been nice to get feedback from the hiring manager though, given the time I spent on the process, even though the role was no longer available.

So I went through 6 rounds for this job, including a 3-hour onsite interview. The company Tavant Technologies and the client NBC seem to have ghosted me. This position has been open forever, advertised since 2018, but they haven't hired anyone. They have this weird rule where they'll only consider you if you haven't applied through Tavant or NBC before, which is odd since everyone knows what's up. If you've interviewed before, they won't look at you again. The first 3 rounds were with Tavant, focusing on technical stuff related to the job description and some easy to medium LeetCode problems on a whiteboard. After that, NBC's test managers interviewed me. These guys were super interruptive, asking infra design questions completely unrelated to QA, and would scrutinize your resume if you were close to an answer. They seemed to lack professionalism, especially considering my US Master's degree. I got an email saying I was selected after this round. Then came the onsite interview in NJ to meet the team and another tech interview. The team members were talented and nice, discussing their daily testing tasks and asking relevant questions about Selenium, TestNG, Cucumber, and backend testing. Finally, there was one more video round to meet the Agile team, which was basically a casual chat about the product. The whole process happened within a week; they were willing to schedule interviews daily. Now, after all that, they're saying the position is on hold. 80 hours of prep, gone.

The interview process had multiple rounds involving different departments like Product, Engineering, and Project Management. Several sessions were scheduled on the same day or across the week, requiring dedicated time for each 30-minute meeting with various interviewers. One hiccup occurred when HR mistakenly didn't add me to a scheduled interview, though the interviewers were invited, almost causing me to miss a session. However, the issue was resolved as it wasn't my error.