I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Apollo.io in Nov 2023
Interview
Started out great with the recruiter giving an overview of the role and interview process.
The first round of interview was great with the hiring manger, and the discussion was positive & friendly.
Here starts the weirdness factor
The recruiter started doing a disappearing act, where they would ghost you for weeks, and then suddenly re-appear to schedule the next round.
- PM Director in the next round seemed highly un-interested in the conversation and was very cold. (definitely was multi-tasking) He kept muting his audio and never turned on his camera.
- Recruiter re-appears after 2 weeks saying they have more candidates at the offer stage.
- They set up the next round which went great and the feedback on the call itself from the interviewers was highly positive.
- Then, recruiter disappeared again.
Overall, their hiring process seems to be a mess.
They call themself a fast-moving org, but their hiring process and HR behaviour is like that of big tech where hiring can take months.
They either have lined up too many candidates that they don't know what to do with, or they are unsure if they want to hire for roles they opened up anymore.
My advice is to avoid interviewing with this company, and it's a high effort process (including home assignment) and the ROI is definitely not worth it.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Typical behavioural heavy questions about failures, product launches, stakeholder maangements
I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Apollo.io
Interview
Complete clown show. They front load the process with a take-home case, run you through a lengthy loop of 4-5 meetings, and then the micromanaging CEO and his zero-EQ robots insert themselves into the process and hijack the application with additional arbitrary rounds (one with the CEO himself lol!) where the real discrimination likely happens.
Read the employee reviews - the product org at Apollo.io is probably the most confused and inferior in the industry. Before going through this process, imagine trying to exit this company when everything you've built and all decisions made (the entire PM value prop) were forced on you by some autist and his servants. They had over 10 PMs voluntarily resign recently. It checks out from the outside.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Q: Why would you want to join Apollo, given so many PMs recently departed?
The first call with the recruiter was great but the second call with the hiring manager fell flat. The hiring manager didn't seem to be very interested in interviewing and the questions lacked depth of curiosity. The case study was fairly standard but I received no feedback. When asking how I can improve for next time, I unfortunately was ghosted. Any good product manager will always provide feedback, even if it is the most perfect artifact.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Case study about using a product and explaining deciding how to implement new features
Interviewed for a Sr. PM position, made it through all rounds but did not get offer at the end. The process was great though. Recruiter kept me in the loop the entire way through. No take home assignment. Spoke to hiring manager, then had 2 virtual on sites with 3/4 folks in each round. There were two case study questions of 45m each.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
If you were the product manager for Google Workspace, how would you improve the onboarding experience.