I applied online. I interviewed at Blend360 in Sep 2024
Interview
1. Recruiter 2. Director and the final round is 6 parts with 5 individual interviews and a panel interview. As others mentioned, they are just trying to steal your ideas. Also, it was amazing how they are working with fortune 5 companies(I doubt that they aren't working in DS for these clientsand the interviews are just bs) .It's surprising that some of the interviewers don't even know what a prospect is, they don't even know what's prompt engineering. During presentation, they tried to get all the important info from the current work and a couple of them tried to be rude but the annoying part is some of them don't even know the basics and had to explain the business objective, eval metrics etc multiple times. I will post some of their stupid questions below.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. Your train/test event rate is 10% but oot test data event rate is 5%. Why did you build the model when with 1:10 event rate without checking the real time data for the next 6 months, which is 5%? - I have 14 years of exp including 8 years of consulting. This is the worst interview question I ever had.
2. This question was asked 3 times. You are building a prospect model to target clients for house refinances, at what stage are you building the model? Underwriting, funding? - It was a surprise to receive such questions in interview. I told them that we are identifying the prospects for marketing before even they reach out/start refinancing but they kept asking me the same questions. Looks like they just want to prove they know couple of things about mortgage industry but it was stupid.
3. I mentioned about a summarization project build on llama2 for my finance company built using call transcripts. Interviewer accused me of lying as he thinks I can't build model because ppl discuss ssn numbers and the details about other companies. Seriously? You are in a senior position and you don't know what's synthetic data or how customer data is redacted internally etc?
3. They are super rude from the start during the project review. I lost interest after 15 minutes as they are constants demeaning my current company and the projects we do when they don't even understand the basics of DS.
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Blend360 (Hyderābād) in Apr 2022
Interview
Initial written test followed by basic interview for 45 mins. After clearing these 2 rounds there are 4 rounds of interview and we need to take all 4 rounds then they give result which include project presentation.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
All rounds mostly have questions on your project. So all rounds feel the same. They simply waste your time. After all the rounds they comeback to you saying they cant give the package and role you initially asked for. They consume lot more time from candidate. Please dont waste your time of effort
I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Blend360 (Baltimore, MD) in Sep 2021
Interview
The interview process is very very long, total 12 rounds of interview! Most of the interviewer does not even know for what position they were interviewing me. Also, some of them were yawning during the interview on a live video and keep cutting/interrupting during the answers. They forced you to keep your video on and to be in the office without any relocation benefits...like they have some trust issues.
There were like 3 recruiters who were working on my case and no one responded promptly when I asked them to confirm the dates. They respond after the original scheduled date/time.
Final presentation was a joke because there was a clear miscommunication between recruiter and hiring managers. They want model presentation from work and need to know all the data and other stuff. If they are working on the diverse projects how come they don't understand the modeling work from a high level presentation!
There were so many indications during the interview process and I am glad that I showed no interest half way the process to save future troubles.
