I reached out to a Slalom Recruiter that I knew through a relation of mine in a different city. She was very proactive at sharing my resume and interests with the local Slalom talent acquisition team. Within a week, I received an email from one of the recruiters in the local office, and she scheduled my interview for the following Friday. That’s 2 weeks so far.
As the date of the interview approached, I reached out to recruiter to request a rescheduling of the interview because I had to focus on my current job. The recruiter was understanding and had no issues pushing the interview one week later. As the second interviewed date approached, I did some research about the local Slalom office, learned about their involvement in the community, and read some of the interview reviews in Glasswork, i.e. common interview questions, and the general feel of the interview. When the date approached, I arrived at the office that Friday afternoon, early enough to look around the office and get a feel of the place. To my surprise, the office was very busy and in an amusingly hectic state. Many people were greeting each other, having short and long conversations in the hallway, walking back and forth between meeting rooms, and wearing the same t-shirt with the logo of the company. Pretty interesting I thought. It didn’t really feel like the traditional consulting firms where everyone is wearing suits or stilettos; not that is a good or bad thing it just wasn’t what I expected.
Then, I was introduced to the first interviewer, and we kicked-it off immediately with a nice conversation. I couldn’t really tell when the conversation ended, and the interview started but it was a very pleasant exchange of experience, questions related to situations I have gone through, and questions aimed to understand my working style and personality. Before I noticed 45 minutes had already gone by. Then, the 2nd interviewer joined the room and the 1st one left. This part of the interview felt more like an introduction to Slalom, how the company was organized, its history, how they operated and with a big emphasis on the interviewer’s experience and career goal. At the end, there were some internal assessment questions. The one I really liked was: What is your superpower (something you are good at) and what is the opposite of it (something I am working on to improve)? To be honest, I knew this question will come up eventually, I just wasn’t expecting to hear words like “superpower”, so that was a surprise. It made me realized that Slalom had a unique approach at interviewing candidates; aiming to get to know them at a personal level instead focusing on their work/career persona. I like that about it.
Before I knew it, 45 minutes had gone by and I was not exhausted at all. On the contrary, I was eager to meet the 3rd interviewer and get to know more about the firm. At this time, I met one of the Talent acquisition managers. He was nice and pleasant to talk to. I was never nervous or anything, but he did ask questions about my career expectations, why I wanted to leave my current job, what my compensation expectations were, and what was my current compensation rate. These were tough questions to answer, just by the nature of the questions. But I felt I could be 100% honest about my answers. He took this very well and left me feeling like our conversation went well. Then, about 30 minutes into our conversation a 4th person joined our conversation. He was a recent hire who happened to have a similar background to mine, and who had joined Slalom recently. In the last 20 minutes, I had the opportunity to ask him about his experience transitioning into Slalom and what he liked the most. All he had to say was positive and good, and it all appear to be very honest and genuine.
With all and all, I have to say the experience was extremely positive and it almost felt like they were ready to welcome me into their family. I really appreciate the time they spent getting to know me at a personal level in addition to my professional experience.
