HarperCollins Interview Questions
& Process

I had a really tough time with this interview process. The first two parts were good: a quick call with HR and then a virtual meeting with two managers from the department. I got good feedback, they answered my questions well, and the emails were great. But for the third round, they asked me to come to their office on short notice during the workday. I had to pretend I had a personal appointment to leave work early. They said they'd decide quickly, but then there was nothing. I emailed HR twice with no response over two weeks later. I then contacted one of the department heads I had a good relationship with, and they gave me a vague answer about a decision soon. About another week and a half after that, I got a rejection email from a no-reply address. Nobody from the company reached out personally or responded to my thank you message asking for feedback. It felt really unprofessional.

The interview process started with a quick chat with the HarperCollins recruiter/HR to go over my work history. Then, I had a second interview with a manager or a more senior person on the analyst team. She asked some unusual questions that seemed to have no right answer and grilled me relentlessly. The whole interview felt very hostile. I decided halfway through I wouldn't want to work there, but I did finish it. Some of the questions didn't seem related to the role. I never heard back from them, and they didn't even have the decency to reject candidates who took time off work to interview.

I applied online and the recruiter from HarperCollins contacted me by email to set up an initial interview. The recruiter went over my background and skills, told me more about the position, and disclosed the salary. I then had a second interview via Teams with the Senior Art Director and the Art Director for the Picture Books team. They asked me to go through my portfolio and talk about my work, and asked why I wanted to work for HarperCollins and in children's publishing. I didn't get an offer but received encouraging advice. I had a third interview for the same position with the VP of the Children's Books team. This was also a relaxed interview where I went over some projects, and she shared about her career path and the team. I didn't get an offer for this second position either, but both roles were highly competitive. The recruiter let me know within a week after the second round interviews that I didn't get the job. Overall, it was a very positive and encouraging experience.

The remote interview happened on Teams. We started with introductions and they mentioned they use "Applied" for hiring. The interview was pretty chill and informal. We talked a lot about my 3D software skills, illustration methods, and past work experience. I shared examples of how I've tackled tough projects. It seemed to go okay, and afterwards, they sent an email asking me to do a test project within 7 days. This test project was like a real brief for the job and was even used in a HarperCollins book. The instructions were really detailed. The next day, I sent the interviewers some of my illustrations we talked about. I didn't hear back, which unfortunately became a pattern. The test project was quite involved, needing 16 small images (2500x2500px) and one big one (2598x3614px), all 3D rendered. Doing all this 3D rendering takes a good amount of time. I had some unexpected issues and couldn't finish the test project by the deadline. I emailed them the day after the deadline to explain, and they were cool about it and said I could still send it in. I sent it about 20 minutes after that and they said they'd review it and get back to me by the end of the week. This was on a Tuesday. I didn't hear anything by the end of the week, so I emailed them the following Monday to ask about my application. Even though I emailed both interviewers directly like they said, I got no reply. Two days later, I sent another email and finally got a response from the Art Director saying they chose someone else. I'm totally fine with not getting the job, that's part of the process. And yeah, I did miss the deadline by a day, which is fair. But asking me to spend so much time on a test project and then ignoring my emails and not giving me an update for over a week after they said they would is really unprofessional, especially for a big publisher like HarperCollins. It feels disrespectful of my time and effort, and frankly, a bit rude. It makes me wonder about their work environment.