It was a very quick, yet thorough process, The communication with the recruiter was excellent throughout. Then, the communication with the hiring manager was excellent as well. The Challenge part was no joke - a good way to weed out candidates that might not be that dedicated or serious about pursuing the position. It also gives candidates a taste for the company, product and position.

The interview process was overall business casual; the approach was conversational and genuine, while still staying focused on getting to know one another and sharing experience to validate candidacy, which I appreciated. After an initial phone screening interview with a Celonis Recruiter, I had a 1:1 meeting with the VP of Customer Value, from there I had a couple 1:1 follow-up meetings with who would be peers on the team. I appreciated this approach because it gave full transparency into the role from the perspective of several different people. I felt like the interviewing was a two-way street, which was also good. I was asked questions about what my own goals/needs were, as well as given the opportunity to share how I could help Celonis reach theirs. For the 3rd/4th interview, we were requested to take part in a "Challenge" in which we were given access to dummy data for a fake Client and had to learn the Celonis software tool to evaluate the data and make recommendations. This involved watching the Celonis-provided tutorial videos and scouring the Celonis website to learn about the company, their history, values, their "pitch," and how the Celonis software actually works; researching vocabulary/acronyms used in the materials read and watched; researching industry best practices around the data and process being evaluated (in order to form thoughtful recommendations); building out a dashboard within the Celonis tool to demonstrate the issues and support the recommendations being made; inputting those findings into a powerpoint deck (using a template they provide); practicing presenting the deck and dashboard data, as if you were presenting to a Client; and finally, doing the actual presentation to the VP and peers I had interviewed with prior. After the Challenge, I met with the Chief Customer Value Officer. The VP prepped me for this meeting, which I greatly appreciated because it showed he was invested in me succeeding before I was even an employee. After that final interview, I was offered the job. I would say the most challenging and rewarding part of the Interview process was the "Challenge" itself. I'm not going to lie, the Challenge probably took me around 40 hours to complete (15 of which was probably just getting organized and stressing out about it - haha). On the one hand, the Challenge really gave me a first-hand view into the kind of work I would be doing, which I appreciated because often times in the interviewing process we have no idea what the job expectations actually will entail until 3 months in. It made me excited about the company and the product, and eager to learn more. It also gave me (and Celonis) confidence that I was a good fit; rather than saying I could do the job, I was given the opportunity to prove to myself and them that I indeed could do the job well. On the other hand, the Challenge was a very large time commitment that not everyone may be able to accommodate on top of working their current job and family obligations. Admittedly, it's called a challenge for a reason, but it occurred to me there may be a way to ask candidates to do a similar challenge, but not as rigorous/time consuming. For example, I have done a challenge like this in the past for a previous employer, but it required closer to 4-8 hours instead of 30-40 hours. It also occurred to me that Celonis may be missing out on a lot of great talent by simple fact that some candidates may not have time to do the Challenge. However, I also recognize that the purpose of a Challenge is, in part, to weed out applicants, as well as see how candidates do with partial information and limited time to pull it together (about a week). Still, as a recovering over achiever, part of me wondered if requiring this much "proof" was some sort of sign for unrealistic working expectations. So far, I have not felt like that since starting, which leads me to believe that perhaps Celonis does not realize what a time commitment their Challenge is to someone who is coming in with very little knowledge? Specifically, within the challenge, I had a hard time configuring the dashboards to convey the data I needed them to in order to support my recommendations (I also wasn't sure why I needed to prove I could create dashboards when my role would not require me to configure them). A quick way for Celonis to make the time commitment of the Challenge more realistic would be to have the Dashboards already setup with the dummy data and configured with the appropriate filters/charts/dropdowns, so it would just be a matter of familiarizing ourselves with the dashboard framework and making recommendations based on our research and what the data was showing. Overall, while the interview process was rigorous, I survived and was offered the job. I came out of the process feeling confident and excited about the role and its responsibilities, which I don't think I would have felt if it weren't for the Challenge.