I applied for the position March 12, 2024 and received an automated email confirmation receipt. A few days later (March 15, 2024), I received an email from the HR Director about setting up a phone interview to briefly discuss the role and my experience. The phone interview happened March 17th and went well. I was contacted to set up a follow up interview with a couple of members from the team on March 22th. While this was a first-round inerview with the hiring manager, I'll consider this a second-round interview in the process.
So, this second interview went well and I shared more about my professional background related to the role, my writing skills, and general marketing experience. I also talk about my values and what I was looking for in the next company I work for. This seemed to align with the hiring manager and graphic designer I interviewed with.
The HR Director followed up to inform me the Hiring Manager (Marketing Director) would like to move forward with me to do a creative brief. I would suggest they tweak this part of the interview process to fit the role. I had four business days to complete the creative brief for copywriting, but the project was ambiguous and required me to get creative. I think the purpose of the creative brief was to gauge the candidate's copywriting ability.
My understanding of a creative brief is about planning a marketing/advertising campaign for project or company. The creative brief instructions were ambiguous, but I don't think they had defined parameters for it.
The team was pleasantly surprised by the hypothetical story I developed and how thourough and detailed my brief was for something I think they only wanted to see written sentences of copy examples for. I'm still confused about the interview assignment. I invested quality time and effort into an ambiguous assigment.
I made it to the final interview which involved presenting the "creative brief" to the team in person. I felt good about the final interview and vibes were positive.
Two weeks went by and the HR Director called and left a quick voice message. I emailed to follow up and she called again to let me know the hiring manager went with another candidate. It was between me and someone else with more extensive writing they were seeking. An email would have been fine, I appreciate the call after the time and work I invested.
Overall, the interview process went well with a decent timeframe, but they should revisit the assignment portion of it.