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Deployment Engineer Interview Experience - Raleigh, North Carolina

August 1, 2017
Negative ExperienceNo Offer

Process

My interview process took over 4 months and was a supreme test of my patience. I had 7 phone interviews, one with HR, one with an engineer which was very technical, one with the team lead/manager which was very technical, one with another manager in the department which was semi-technical, a semi-technical with a Customer Support Lead, a call with the hiring Director which was semi-technical, and a panel interview. In those 4 months and 7 phone interviews, only 2 went off on time on the day they were originally scheduled. All 5 that had to be rescheduled were because of issues at Zscaler. If you think that’s bad, the hiring director missed 2 calls and was late for one. I was once called at 8 p.m. Eastern on a Friday night to do an unscheduled interview which I was unavailable to take. Of the four calls that were rescheduled, three of them I didn’t find out about the rescheduling until I called them after waiting 20 minutes beyond the scheduled time they were supposed to call me. One of the calls the director missed was when they called me to schedule an interview with the director while I was on vacation. I agreed to do the call with only a 2-hour notice, and they asked for a one-hour time window for the director to call me. Well, the director never called. I had to call them after sitting in my hotel room for 3 hours waiting for the director to call me within his 1-hour window. When I called them, they apologized profusely and rescheduled the call, which the director again missed and had his technical lead/manager take the call 15 minutes later than it was scheduled. When I finally had my panel interview, it was with only one other person in the room; everyone else joined via Google Hangout. I felt bad for the person whose office was used, as their office was basically a 5x5 closet. The panel interview consisted of about 45 minutes of me doing presentations to a group of ever-changing people who seemed to be playing musical chairs by coming in and out of the room while I was presenting. Then I was subjected to about 30-45 minutes of technical and interpersonal skills questions by again an ever-changing group of people playing musical chairs by coming and going during the question phase of the interview process. I was constantly re-answering questions for latecomers to the interview. Of the interviewers, I believe only 2 were new people I had not interviewed with previously over the phone. The panel interview became very tedious and trying, not because the questions themselves, just the process and lack of preparedness on the part of the Zscaler people. After the panel interview, it was 27 days before I heard anything, and I had to contact them to find out the results of the interview process, even after they had promised to keep me informed. Now that I am free to voice my experience and opinion on their process, I first want to say remember I wasn’t looking for a job and I made my salary requirements known up front. Secondly, I wrote them off during the process several times as a waste of time, only to have them contact me several weeks later each time apologizing for their mistakes and basically telling me how they really wanted me to continue the process and how they were so impressed with me. This led me to believe they really wanted to hire me. However, I had decided by the fourth interview that unless they offered me the top of my salary range with great benefits and bonus structure, I was going to turn them down flat on principle alone. As for the interview process as a whole, I felt very disrespected by their interview process and their lack of professionalism, especially in the panel interview process. While the people themselves seemed to be nice, and the company seems to have a good reputation, and appeared to offer great growth potential for a person of my skill sets and experience, they did not portray that in their interview process. Perception is a killer, and their lack of professionalism in my interview process killed my opinion of Zscaler. What really upset me the most in the end was the huge amount of my time they wasted, and how they seemed to think that they were doing me a favor by interviewing me. In the end, I got the impression that my salary requirements were too high for the position, which I agree my requirements were at the top of their pay scale for that position, but I wasn't looking for a job, I was looking for an opportunity.

Questions

Name and describe the ways to do SSL inspection.

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Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 1 interview experience for the Zscaler Deployment Engineer role in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Success Rate

0%
Pass Rate

Zscaler's interview process for their Deployment Engineer roles in Raleigh, North Carolina is extremely selective, failing the vast majority of engineers.

Experience Rating

Positive0%
Neutral0%
Negative100%

Candidates reported having very negative feelings for Zscaler's Deployment Engineer interview process in Raleigh, North Carolina.