I interviewed at Qualtrics a couple of days back.

I applied through LinkedIn. The recruiter sent me an email and scheduled a time to chat.

The HR call lasted for about an hour. He asked behavioral questions:

• Tell me about yourself.
• What are you passionate about?
• What do you enjoy doing?
• What’s prompting you to talk to us today?
• Current compensation?
• What do you own/responsible for currently?
• How would you deal with a difficult colleague?
• Tell me about the top 2-3 achievements you are proud of.
• Tell me about a time when management made a decision you didn’t agree with; how did you react?
• Tell me about a time when you could have done something differently for a better result in your career.
• Any mistakes to speak of?

After going through all these, HR sent me questions and asked me to record my response. I thought he was asking me to do his job, but when you are hoping to get an offer, you don’t mind doing HR’s job, do you?

After the HR telephonic round, I got a response and they asked me for available time slots for the first telephonic round. They offered me an option of an onsite first round. I chose it.

The first telephonic round:

The manager took the interview. The interviewer was very cooperative, considerate, and friendly. All the people at Qualtrics are from Amazon, so they follow Amazon’s model. The interviewer was taking notes of what I was talking about and my coding question answers.

The technical question was easy. Along with the technical question, he also asked me for test cases for one scenario.

Some behavioral questions like why Qualtrics? Culture, some previous experience questions.

I got positive feedback and they scheduled another loop of interviews. The coordinator sent me interview details.

Interview day:

Out of four, two interviewers were changed without notifying me.

Interview one: I think this was the bar raiser interview for me. He was not aware he had to interview me. He asked me some typical questions: Why Qualtrics and tell me about yourself. He explained one test scenario and asked me to write test cases. I started by writing categories for test cases, then continued telling him test cases for each category and adding some more categories. After 20 minutes, he started asking me to write whatever I was saying. After other interviews, I realized that they needed to record the interview; telling test cases was not helping him fill his interview report. No coding question. I think because of this interview, I did not receive an offer.

Interview 2:

They changed the interviewer for this round. Same format; they introduced themselves. Asked me a technical question. The technical question was very easy. I wrote the code in 15-20 minutes. Dry-ran the code for a couple of different inputs, and made some changes for invalid inputs.

After that, they asked me for test cases for different products. They chose not to ask me test cases for the program I wrote.

For 30-40 minutes, I was telling test cases and different test scenarios.

At the end, 4-5 minutes for me to ask them questions. I used this time to know more about the company, the culture, and what they like about Qualtrics.

Interview 3:

This person was part of the testing team. The technical problem was very easy; I solved it within 15-20 minutes. The rest of the time was spent on test cases.

This person asked some behavioral questions, asked what you will do in this case, etc.

I used the opportunity to know more about the team and about growth.

I asked him how much time they spend doing manual testing versus writing automation tools. My impression is that they do more manual testing than automation.

Interview 4:

The same as 2 and 3. Even every interviewer was telling the same client success story. Don’t you even have another interesting story to tell? But when you are doing well, you don’t want to screw things up by showing you are bored, right?

At the end, the recruiter coordinator told me I would know about the outcome by mid-week.

I was hoping for an offer because, except for the first one, I think I performed very well.

I waited for a response. They never came back, so I followed up with them.

I got a response: "Unfortunately, we are not moving forward." The reason was the technical bar wasn't met.

Which technical bar are you talking about? They asked me very easy/basic coding questions like reversing the string.

There was not a single coding question I was unable to solve, code, or unit test. Even during the interview, I was thinking I unnecessarily prepared for this interview.

I don’t think they tested my technical abilities during those four hours; rather, they don’t have people or a process to test a person’s technical skills.

Most interviewers are new to interviewing other people. If their decision is not a team decision, I don’t understand why they conducted four interviews. They don’t value your time, I guess.

Advice to people who are trying testing roles at Qualtrics: prepare for writing test cases.

Simple coding question