General Motors (GM) Interview Questions
& Process

So I interviewed for a Senior Designer role. The process started off great, with friendly people and multiple calls and video chats. I spoke with the recruiter a few times and had two video interviews. The first was a general fit interview, and the second was a deep dive into my work, lasting over two hours. While I usually accept rejections, it was really disappointing to wait a week after the extensive interviews just to get an automated rejection from Workday. The recruiter had all my contact info and even connected on LinkedIn, so it felt odd to be cut off so impersonally after investing so much time. I reached out after the interviews and again a week later, but only got that generic message. It's a shame because the people were nice, but that cold ending makes me not want to work at GM and I won't recommend it. My friends who worked there previously also told me similar things.

So the whole thing took like 3+ months, GM was super slow getting back to me. First, there was this 15-minute video thing with 5 questions, you only got 3 minutes to record each answer. It was buggy and I wasn't sure if my answers even sent. Then the onsite at Lake Orion was a mess. They were hiring a ton of people (200+), and getting into the plant was a nightmare, security didn't even know about the hiring event. We all just stood around waiting for interviewers. The interviewers, two leaders who seemed like they barely knew each other, fumbled with papers and took up time prepping. It was supposed to be STAR format for 4 questions, then Q&A, but they didn't seem to know basic stuff about the job or company. They specifically asked for a thank you email, but the recruiter never replied to mine or my questions. It felt really impersonal, like we were just numbers.

In the internship selection process, I had an initial interview with a manager. They asked me to introduce myself and talk a bit about my background. Then, they asked a question about how I handle conflict situations, requesting a specific example, which I answered using the STAR method. After this, I was invited to a group activity, which was in-person in São Caetano do Sul. In this activity, we had to work on a case study as a group. This case study was provided beforehand so we could prepare, as time is limited during the actual session. The whole group activity went smoothly: we introduced ourselves, watched presentations about GM's different areas, worked on the case study, and then had individual interviews with the managers of the departments we were interested in. They told us right away whether we were selected or not.

The interview process involved a technical interview, followed by a coding interview, and then a behavioral round. We'll dive into your core experience with large-scale data/telemetry pipelines, ADAS/AV systems, vector databases, LLM automation, root-cause analysis tooling, and signal processing & anomaly detection. We also want to hear about your familiarity with ECU, CANoe, CANape, Linux, and embedded workflows. Additionally, we'll assess your system design thinking, your ability to build tools for embedded/AI/QA teams, your problem-solving style, and your ownership and end-to-end engineering mindset. Expect questions like 'Explain your projects', 'How would you design a tool for X?', and 'Tell me about a time you solved a complex problem.'