I had originally applied for another position than what I ended up interviewing for. I took this as a positive sign that the recruiter and hiring team know what the team is requiring from their next manager.

The panel was composed of 4 interviews: (recruiter screen, hiring manager, architect, director of SRE and an EM this team would work very closely with.

From here on the whole process seemingly took a left turn. The hiring team never shared with me what aspects of the role or topics, i.e. system design, behavioral, technical deep dives, management of cross-functional stakeholders, etc., the different rounds would cover. I reached out to the hiring team and asked if they could share this information with me so I can be better prepared but never received a response. Now, that might very well be intentional design of SentinelOne's interview process to leave candidates in the dark about the interview topics and that is OK. With 20+ years industry experience I can roughly infer that from a person's title and LinkedIn profile.

However, it turned out that the interviewers were not well prepared either.

For one, each person I spoke with had a different take on it ranging from strong technical leader that leads from the front to people manager that can manage personalities. I think that range is valid, but it also showed that neither interviewer nor the hiring manager could truly articulate what they're looking for.

I answered in 4 rounds, including the hiring manager round, the same questions with no deeper follow-ups: Tell me about your CI/CD process, how many production services do you run, what's the size of your org, have you managed somebody out for performance reasons, do you think it's going to be an issue to manage a team that is primarily in Europe and you are on the west coast?

The last interview wrapped up beginning of September since then the team has been completely silent despite a couple of follow-ups. At least have the decency to click "Reject" in the ATS and send the candidates canned response.

Suggestions for the hiring team:

• Be aligned on what you're hiring for and the constraints. I.e. if you have concerns about timezone, it is your prerogative to set those constraints in the job ad.
• Benchmark candidates against the job requirements and not against each other.
• Prepare your interviewers on what topics to cover, even if you don't share them with candidates. At the minimum the panel shouldn't ask the same questions over and over again.
• Do not ghost candidates.