This interview actually arose from an initial interview where I was being considered for a job as a Software Trainer. The interviewer asked me why I was applying for a job that seemed below my abilities (the reasons were myriad), and the conversation led to me applying and being interviewed for a System Analyst position. Overall, I got the impression that while the various departments do communicate with each other, they don't necessarily coordinate with each other in terms of recruiting, hiring, and interviewing candidates. My second round interviewers did not seem to be briefed on my various past experiences and skillsets, and the interview was pretty much a rehash of my first interview. Culture-wise, despite still being a private pre-IPO company aiming for IPO one day in the future, The Active Network seems to have evolved out of the startup culture it was purported to once have. My questions on support for innovation, grassroots initiatives, and bottom-up control were met with statements on the importance of procedures, hierarchy-based authority, and standardized processes. While these are very important things for an organization to have, one who may have been expecting more of a startup feel would probably be surprised at the amount of bureaucracy that seems to have developed. However, these statements are being made from the impression received from only two interviews, not from actually working in the organization. I could not discern from these interviews the level of politics the organization has, but my experience tells me that the more bureaucracy, the more the politics. The difficulty of the interviews were nothing special. There was a phone interview to screen me for viability, then some online tests to analyze personality and intelligence, with the intelligence test providing a total score at the end. Finally, the face-to-face interviews involved the usual simple and standard questions on teamwork, past experiences, and personal philosophies. Overall, I'd say that the interviews were quite vanilla. Nothing fantastic, but also nothing horrible or demeaning.