Horizon Media Interview Questions
& Process

I started with a phone chat with the Talent Acquisition person. They asked me some general questions about my background and told me more about Horizon. Then, I got a written assessment and a math assessment. For the written part, I could pick between two prompts: "What excites you about the media industry and why?" or "Describe an ad that had a significant impact on you as a consumer, and why?", with a 250-word limit. The next interview was with two people from the team I'd be joining. It seemed to go okay, but I didn't move on. The Talent Acquisition person gave me some helpful feedback on why I wasn't selected, which was appreciated.

I had an interview with Luke Thomson at Horizon Media for analyst roles. We talked about using tools like Python and SQL for analytics and I said I was good with them. Luke mentioned my experience might be good for more senior roles. He asked me what I look for in a new role, and I said learning, but I should have said more about tools and industry expertise. We also discussed moving to NY, the company's media and analytics setup, and how internal moves work. It was a chill chat, and they said visa sponsorship could be possible for some roles.

It was a pretty quick two-step interview process where they check your personality and how much you know about advertising overall. The first part was with two HR/Hiring folks and was pretty laid-back. Mostly, they asked standard interview questions like, "How do you handle multiple projects with the same due date" and "Tell me about a time you dealt with a really stressful work situation." The second part was with my potential managers, and the questions were more focused on your technical skills and what you've done before in the real world.

So, after the initial recruiter screening call which was a mess, a different recruiter reached out to set up the interviews by asking for my availability. They scheduled three 30-minute virtual interviews via Microsoft Teams, one each day for three days. The first two interviews seemed to go really well, the interviewers were nice and answered questions easily, even staying late to chat. But the third interview was weird. The interviewer kept his camera off, which was strange, and he sounded super stressed, sighing a lot. He cut me off when I was talking about my experience and immediately jumped into questions about KPIs, optimizing social budgets, and building audiences, all while sighing. It felt like he didn't want to be there. I couldn't even finish explaining my experience. He kept interrupting with rapid-fire questions. When I finally got to ask my questions, I asked about company culture and valuing employee time, and he fumbled his answer while sighing again. It made me think I'd be overworked with no overtime pay. He basically confirmed it by saying it's like any agency, you have to work overtime, but tried to spin it. My current agency is the same type, but we don't get overworked because they don't see the point in working overtime without pay and encourage us to log off. This makes me feel like Horizon Media doesn't value employee time. Also, the first recruiter totally ghosted my emails for 3 weeks, not responding at all, even though they were liking posts on LinkedIn. It shows a lack of professionalism and respect. The unlimited PTO reviews also seem misleading because nobody covers for you when you're out, leading to a huge backlog when you return. My current agency covers for people out of office, which is teamwork. Horizon Media needs to improve their culture.