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Comment by transcriptase | Hacker News Reader

Apply to Procter & Gamble, and as part of the application itself enjoy being put through 1-2 hours of ambiguous personality/morality testing and Mensa-style math, memorization, and logic puzzles! With adaptive difficulty!

It's the most surreal and absurd experience. There are actually prep courses you can pay for just to improve your odds on the P&G testing process just to get someone to actually see your resume. Be warned though: if you don't score sufficiently high for the position you've applied to, you're banned from applying for any job at the company for a year!

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Many years ago, I had to complete a long personality inventory AND about 45 minutes of "what would you do"-type scenario simulations to apply for a job at...Kmart!

Then the manager no-showed when I came in for the interview.

Retail applications have gotten lazy recently. I put one in, and they wanted a recorded interview. No one on the other side, I was expected to just awkwardly record myself answering some questions and send it in.

I was asked to do that for a state government job that paid above market, so it's not just retail. It was awkward and I would probably decline to do it again unless for some reason I still really wanted the job.

Is P&G a particularly great employer that justifies such a bizarre job application?

The worse the job, usually the worse the application process. In my experience anyway.

If you want to work in advertising and marketing, yes. If I recall correctly it's reputation in those circles is equivalent to FAANG in tech.

I recall seeing a presentation in school by a young brand manager at P&G where they were talking about their excitement of being in charge of sales and marketing of a particular body wash in the southwest region.

What?, no - not really. Perhaps in fmcg specialty shops you'd get some creds - but as in tech you're primariæy judged on past projects not past x

It’s pretty regionally highly regarded, to the point that my brother-in-law voluntarily resigned to form his own business and people would disbelieve him that he wasn’t fired from P&G (even after knowing that his business is successful). They just assume “no one around here quits P&G so he must have been fired.”

And then, if you're feeling lucky apply to Canonical for a 10 step recruiting fun.

Canonical sent me a 30 question "written interview" which asked all sorts of personal and irrelevant questions as the first step in their interview process. I ghosted them.

are they considered the faang in their domain?

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