GREE International Entertainment Interview Questions
& Process

It took over a month to even get a phone interview, but I passed the first one with the internal recruiter who really liked me. After about another week, I had an interview with the studio head. This interview went really badly. He refused to call me by my name, and when I corrected him, he said he wouldn't call me by it. He seemed dismissive and uninterested the whole time. When I said I could create playable game prototypes, he said I couldn't unless I knew C#, and when I mentioned visual scripting, he just said 'right'. He also seemed surprised I wanted to get back into the Australian industry, asking if I'd never been in it. Some of his questions were vague and unclear, and even when I asked for clarification, he said he was being purposefully vague. He didn't remember me at all, even though I'd met him in person and we'd corresponded by email. He was dismissive and negative throughout. I put together a portfolio of work, art, designs, and playable prototypes, but when I asked if he looked at it, he said he preferred talking to people about design over looking at work. He was also disappointed I wasn't playing the top 10 app store games.

So I applied for a role while I was an American citizen living in Singapore. For international candidates, GREE used Top Career International to find people. You submit an application, and if they like your CV, they'll call you to let you know you're being considered and that you'll get an interview. This whole thing took about 6 weeks. A couple weeks after my Top Career interview, I had my first GREE interview with a product manager. We mostly talked about mobile games, managing teams, and the different kinds of tasks that come up in any office these days. It was basically a screening process. Another week later, I found out I passed the first GREE interview and that I'd be contacted for another interview in a month or two. I'm just saying this to show that it was a really long process. This next interview was with the VP of marketing, and it required a translator since GREE is a Japanese company, although they do pay for language lessons, which is a nice perk. However, the cultural and language barriers were just too much. The interview lasted about 45 minutes before the VP had to leave, and neither of us could really get a feel for the other. Then we played scheduling games trying to set up another follow-up interview, and a few weeks later, I had the final chat with another product manager. We mostly talked about work stuff, which felt like a good sign. We exchanged tips, discussed strategy, and a little about office culture. Then, about a week later, after almost four months of hiring, I got an email unceremoniously saying they were moving in a different direction.

I applied on their homepage and a recruiter reached out about a week later. The first interview was with HR, lasting about 30 minutes, focusing on my background, past work, and how I found out about the company. After a two-week wait for feedback, I had a second phone interview with an engineer. This was a 40-minute technical session where they first asked about my resume and then presented two algorithm problems, like finding an iterative solution for post-order traversal of a BST and calculating the largest sum path from root to leaf. I was invited for an onsite interview two weeks later, but I had already accepted another offer and withdrew my application.

Interview experience was okay. It included a phone screen, a technical call, a programming project, and an onsite interview. The team was friendly and had good discussions. The onsite interview was messy. I was put straight into development questions without an intro from HR about the day's schedule, which made me nervous due to the abrupt start. Since I hadn't interviewed in a while, I wasn't ready for the academic/obscure questions. My first interviewer seemed to seal my fate, though I spoke with two others afterward, and those went well. However, there were no practical questions, nothing related to the specific tech or language they were hiring for, and no real questions that let me showcase my experience relevant to the job description. I'm fine not getting the job, but I wish they'd interviewed me properly instead of deciding after the first hour based on irrelevant stuff.