The first phone screen was with the recruiter.

The second phone screen is with the hiring manager.

The next round is an on-site interview day, including a mix of job fit and behavioral interviews, and one case study interview.

Job fit interviews are free-floating. However, for the behavioral interviews, the interviewers go through a list of prepared and coordinated questions.

The case study interview centers around a break-even analysis.

We want to offer extended transaction reporting to our customers.

Today, customers often call unnecessarily if they see a transaction on their monthly statement and do not remember it. Each call costs us about $15.

Research shows that we could reduce the number of calls by 2% if we offered additional details for each transaction, such as the location, more detailed merchant information (instead of just the payment processor), and the correct time (not as reported by the payment processor).

However, to do this, we need to buy services from external vendors. They offer a service where we would supply the transaction and receive additional information for it, as outlined above.

We have two vendors we could work with:

• Vendor A: Vendor A would charge us 10 cents per transaction sent. They could provide the additional data for about 60% of the transactions.
• Vendor B: Vendor B would charge us 5 cents per transaction sent. They could provide the additional data for about 40% of the transactions.

Questions:

1. Which vendor should we pick and why?
2. Besides the financial data, what other considerations could be important?
3. Would your recommendation change if we had a fixed budget of $100k?
4. Assuming we have different possible budget scenarios, up to what point would you recommend one vendor over the other (based on financial considerations only)?

The questions were not all asked upfront. Actually, the interviewer led the candidate through a developing scenario along the four key questions.

Only material allowed was paper for notes, a pen, and a standard calculator. The interviewer did provide help along the way through guiding questions. At the end of the interview, all notes were collected. So, the details of the scenario (e.g., exact numbers) as well as the lead-in story (e.g., details on the additional transaction details) are from memory.