Really terrible candidate experience. I had spoken with the Chief Revenue Officer on the phone on a Thursday evening, which ended with him telling me he'd love to meet me in person. I was immediately sent an interview request for the Monday with a detailed task to work on over the weekend. I arrived on the Monday having worked for 3 days on the task, which I was told was of really good quality. The interview consisted of a role-play negotiation with a potential client and a session of questions from the Chief Revenue Officer, a Business Development Director and a Business Development Manager. I felt the interview went well and was told I'd hear back within 2 days. 4 days later I'd heard nothing. I contacted the Chief Revenue Officer over email to ask, but received nothing. On day 5 I received a standard template rejection from HR with no detail or feedback as to why I hadn't been moved to the next stage. I then emailed the Chief Revenue Officer to ask for some feedback. After not receiving any reply yet again, I replied to the standard HR email to ask. I was then told that the Chief Revenue Officer would get back to me with detailed feedback. It's now been over 8 weeks and I've received NOTHING. Extremely disappointing experience. Given the time invested, I would expect at least a few lines of feedback...it's left me questioning the company's culture.

Overall I'd describe the interview process as being involved, fairly demanding and certainly time-consuming. During the interview process I did; 3 phone calls + 1 video call Sales presentation preparation (a pre-in person interview exercise required to get to the next stage) In-person 1:1 interview Role play exercise (sales presentation) Additional 1:1 interviews Out of the 4 calls, the interviewer was late for two of them (between 15 and 30 minutes late) and the final call was switched from a call to a video interview at literally the last minute (as in, genuinely, one minute before the call), which wasn't ideal, not least as I was fielding the call from overseas on my holiday. The initial calls were fairly standard interview fare, after which you're asked to prepare a sales deck / presentation for a client pitch. Following that, at interview you do a role-play exercise where you pitch the deck and try to close the theoretical deal. The exercise is a pretty decent one, although reasonably demanding in that obviously it requires dedicating plenty of time and effort to it. The actual in-person interview was ok, not brilliant, and it was quite difficult to maintain a flow as people entered and left the interview at various stages to go off to other meetings, which meant there was quite a lot of repeating yourself and stopping and starting and being fairly difficult to get a handle on who knew what at any given stage, not helped by the fact that two of the interviewers obviously hadn't done any preparation (ie. properly looking at the CV in question) or had any briefing before the interview. In addition, despite having already done two previous calls with my interviewer before the in-person interview, most of the first part of the interview was spent being asked to cover ground (ie. my CV / experience) that we'd already covered twice on the phone. Finally, as two of the more senior interviewers had to go off to other meetings during the interview, my time for questions was with a fairly junior / inexperienced member of staff who unfortunately couldn't talk very meaningful about anything 'bigger picture' about the company (which, in fairness, I don't particularly think was his fault). The final stage was a video interview with the CEO, who came across as smart, thoughtful, considered and likeable and I think it reflects well on the company that he's personally involved in final stage interviews. Some of the things that I'd flag for anyone thinking of applying to Tessian, albeit only based on my experience, would be; - The interview and application process is really quite demanding, which is fair enough in a way, but their expectations of candidates are not reciprocated with a similar level of organisation and professionalism on their part and some elements of the interview experience could be considered actively disrespectful. - Despite how involved the process was, they've declined to provide any feedback as to why I wasn't successful. - They appear to be quite close-minded in terms of what they're looking for and definitely seem to have a certain 'type'. I spotted some comments along these lines on Glassdoor from people working there and that would definitely chime with my brief impressions of the company. - A couple of people involved in the process came across as fairly arrogant (although that's certainly not true of everyone I spoke to there) - My impression of their ideal candidate for this and similar roles would be someone with a strong educational background (Top 10 University, roughly speaking), followed by a standard path career into a large and conventional corporate environment (Credit Suisse, Goldman Sacs, Deloitte, HSBC etc) and that they value that type of background much more highly than sales experience and expertise. As such, I would definitely caution against investing effort in applying if you don't fit that profile and, indeed if you look across the experience of the team you could argue that they actively don't want people with software sales experience and so that's something to consider if that's your background / experience. Of course, if you do fit that profile, then it could be a great fit for you. Whilst some of the interview process was positive, the combination of how much they ask of candidates and their subsequent refusal to provide any feedback leaves a bad taste in the mouth and, whilst I'm by no means directly familiar with this area, I'd have thought that those two things, together with the general profile of the team overall, could mean they leave themselves open to charges of discriminatory hiring practices (for example, it would be interesting to know how many parents work at Tessian and that's also to consider if you're applying a role there and it's relevant for you).