After applying online I heard back two weeks later to come in for an interview. The interview lasted a couple hours. I was interviewed by 7 people who came in one after the other. They asked me to describe myself and relevant experience. It was very relaxed and I felt comfortable asking lots of questions.
I applied online. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at King & Spalding (Redwood City, CA) in Nov 2012
Interview
I submitted my resume online for a position in a California office and was contacted via email within a few days by someone in their Houston office to set up an initial phone interview. The phone interview was very easy; it lasted about 10 minutes and mostly consisted of questions regarding my resume, work experience and schooling. The interviewer was very pleasant and let me know that they were still in the process of defining the position, the definition of which would determine the likelihood of my progression in the hiring process. About a week later, I received an email from the interviewer saying they needed someone with more experience, so I would not be needed. The next day, I got an email from the hiring manager in the California office asking to set up an in-person interview. Clearly there was some sort of lack of communication going on within the firm.
This impression was confirmed during my in-person interview a few days later. The hiring manager was very friendly and we talked for about half an hour. She asked more questions about my work experience and told me more about the firm. She tried hard to impress upon me the utter boredom of the job and the extreme number of overtime hours that would be expected, should I be hired. She also stressed that there was a regrettable lack of efficiency in the upper levels of the firm and a lot of unnecessary bureaucratic red tape, as something of an explanation for the conflicting messages I received regarding the in-person interview. I appreciated her honesty but wondered if she was trying to warn me away tacitly.
After speaking with the hiring manager, I was led to an empty office room to talk with the paralegal who would directly supervise the position for which I was interviewing. She was nice but completely unprepared and asked me awkward situational questions about workplace scenarios for about 20-25 minutes. Then she left me in the room and two of the lawyers came to speak with me for a little bit. The first lawyer was more experienced in the business, and, like the hiring manager, did his part to ensure that I was aware of the utter boredom and monotony of being a Project Assistant, but also the importance of all the boring little things one would have to do. The second lawyer was quite young and just looked at my resume and asked me about my most exciting job experience, and told me he would put a word in for me if anyone asked him. After that, he walked me over to the paralegal's office so she could take me back to the hiring manager, who concluded the interview and showed me out.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
"Say that you were working on a project and had a deadline you *had* to make. But a coworker approached you needing help on a project of their own, and helping them would definitely mean you missed your own deadline. So you help them, and miss your deadline. What do you do?"
Project Assistant applicants have rated the interview process at King & Spalding with 2.8 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 83% positive. To compare, the company-average is 66.2% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Project Assistant roles take an average of 24 days to get hired, when considering 7 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at King & Spalding overall takes an average of 25 days.
Common stages of the interview process at King & Spalding as a Project Assistant according to 7 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 38%
One on one interview: 38%
Group panel interview: 25%
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