Days from application date to rejection notice: 65
Number of total interviews: 7
Total hours spent on a 65-day process: 12
This was the slowest, least communicative, least professional hiring process I've encountered in my 15-year career.
Be very careful applying to either Celebrity or Royal Caribbean as a senior manager unless you are fine running a multi-month, snail-speed process.
Highlights Included:
- No information about the hiring process and its steps/timeline. You must badger someone to get small tidbits of clues that you can piece together to understand what the process may or may not be.
- There is no information at all about salary bands or expected benefits for a role. To get such information, I had to have a "special after hours call" to play a back-and-forth guessing game in order to be told if my salary number "was in the ballpark or not". Literally like a gameshow. Massive lack of respect and transparency for senior candidates' time.
- To get any updates on how your 65-day process is moving, expect to have to reach out multiple times on your own accord to get an update. Zero structure, urgency, or expectation-setting from the team.
- When given a date or time that you should expect communication from the team, expect that timeline to be blown. It was blown every single time I was told "you'll hear from someone tomorrow" or "we'll line up the interviews in the next 48 hours". Most deadlines they set for themselves they blew past, makes sense why they can't communicate what to expect from the process. It's not at all clear that they understand how to run a tight, professional process.
- The interview case study prompt was one line of obscure text without any data sets or accompanying information. If you ask for more data to understand their company and/or ships for example, the answer was "just look at the website".
Overview:
I've never recommended someone to not apply to a company before, but I have to raise a major red flag here on both Celebrity and Royal Caribbean so that other senior managers who come from tightly-run organizations know what they're getting into here. It's slower to apply here than the US State Department (who I've worked for previously), it's quite hard to be that opaque and bureaucratic as a private company, but Royal/Celebrity seem to have achieved that.
Aside from the bizarre process, the people were generally really nice and the company seems like it's trying to rejuvenate itself. Hopefully it can find ways to figure out how to operate with more transparency/urgency.