The opportunity presented itself to me through a third-party recruiting firm. This makes total sense with how quickly the company is growing -- I'm sure their internal recruiters have too many applications to review in their individual bandwidth.
Two weeks after my screening with their outsourced recruiting firm, I then was moved forward to speak with one of Slack's internal Senior Recruiters. In all honesty, I felt their Senior Recruiter was completely detached from the interview from the very beginning. I could hear the "Slack chat" alert pinging in the background of our phone interview. I was told to "please hold" approximately two or three times throughout a half hour phone interview. The majority of the Senior Recruiter's questions were about my previous experience, and the questions focused greatly around tenured experience with Enterprise customers. I would say in terms of questions, I probably had 60% of the questions during the interview, as I was curious about the day-to-day for a CSM at their organization and how they drive adoption and product engagement -- sadly these questions were never answered in great detail.
Overall, I was very much interested in Slack, but maybe I caught their internal recruiter on an unusually busy day? It was extremely displeasing to have their own product (Slack alerts/chatter) interrupt my phone interview, and was very unprofessional of their recruiter to even have other work open mid interview. Below, I've listed a few topics or statements that I feel could help future candidates/applicants:
- The Slack Senior Recruiter: "This is more an individual contributor (IC) role ... We have people basically leaving management level roles or consulting (Bain / McKinsey/etc) to take on the ENT CSM roles here at Slack..." If you are applying either organically or with experience, just be aware that your are in an uphill consideration battle because of the quality of candidate that Slack recruiters are saying they are gathering and interviewing.
- The Third-Party Recruiting Firm: They actually did a spectacular job -- I strongly advise that Slack continue to use their services. They did ask me for a timeline of my growth both financially and based on titles/promotions over a last 3-4 year period. They attributed this to Slack recruiters wanting to see growth and progress clearly mapped out for the candidates they are surfacing to their internal team.
- They mentioned that for an in person, it would be a series of reviews with other members of the CSM team. They wanted to have me provide a very detailed and in-depth analysis of my previous corporate experiences but additionally mentioned including my background prior to even college. This was surprising, but the Slack recruiter mentioned this helps them really tie together the entire persona and applicants story.
