Dovetail (Australia) interview questions

It goes from recruiter > hiring manager/AE > Presentation/demo > VP/Dir > VP/Dir. The interview process felt loosely structured and intentionally ambiguous which made it difficult to know what success looked like at each stage. Rather than following a consistent rubric or framework each step seemed to vary in expectations, format, and feedback quality. Early stages focused on broad questions about experience and approach, but lacked clarity on how those answers were being evaluated. The later rounds, particularly the demo, appeared to test for specific, unspoken preferences (presentation style, how soon you engaged certain personas, how much you “clicked around”, and if you tried to wow the them with a feature) rather than measurable sales competencies. Feedback was inconsistent and subjective, often framed as “you have potential, but” or “you put in a lot of work although.” This implied that decisions were more about internal fit or readiness than about actual performance in the exercises. Overall, the process came across as open ended by design with interviewers leaving a lot of room for interpretation. It created uncertainty and an uneven playing field. You were asked to show creativity and ownership, but given little guidance on what “great” looked like.

For the final (3rd) interview, you are asked to demo the Dovetail product, yet they do not give you an interviewee sandbox account which makes the task awkward, unnessarily confusing and frustrating. I am currently working and it would be unethical to integrate one of my accounts with my current employer into the Dovetail free trial in order to have some sort of product to show for the interview mock demo and if you try to manually add content that doesn't work either. A dummy demo account would help the candidate see and understand the product a ton and be able to build a much more solid mock demo - asking someone who doesn't know the product to demo an empty account is in poor taste in my opinion. It shows a lack of care and respect for the candidate and creates a negative vibe for the company culture. If they're testing your ability to be resourceful and fill in the blanks, I get that but it sets the wrong tone by what feels like intentionally frustrating your candidates when it would be super easy for them to just create a super bare bones, simple sandbox for them to use. It seems like a very strange recruiting move for them to make and if they want and like it that way, they should explain that in the beginning. I wasted a LOT of time recruiting engineers and friends to help me because I thought I was doing something wrong in my attempts to manually add data when it fact it simply doesn't do that well so not only did I get a bad impression of Dovetail so did the friends I recruited to try to help me. Also, I thought the recent ad they ran about Cycle App was horrific so I don't align with this companies values (or lack thereof) in several ways so for the best.