Chicago Companies Among Toughest to Interview For: Survey

Chicago’s Thoughtworks and ZS Associates were named among Glassdoor’s top 25 most difficult companies to interview for, according to the anonymous company reviews site.

I’m always slightly skeptical of reviews sites in general because the people most likely to use them are those who have the most extreme experiences (i.e. “I loved this” or “I hated this”). But the consensus on these two companies on Glassdoor does seem to be this: These are companies with multiple, multiple rounds of interviews and some of those are occasionally run by people who don’t seem that enthused to be doing the interviews.

These reviews are purely subjective, of course, so I don’t want to focus too much on them here. I guess the bigger question here is: Is it good to have this sort of reputation? I think it is.

Think of it like this: If you heard a company was tough to get an interview at, and the process of being interviewed was also arduous, what sort of reaction might you have? Would you be scared? Would you be emboldened?

It would telegraph the message that this is a place for risk-takers, which, sure, sounds somewhat clichéd to say, but I’ve found there’s no better way to get someone to do something than to declare it can’t be done.

After all, the fact that these two Chicago companies landed on this list at all means people will be talking about them and checking them out — and not just because it triggered a blog post here.

Something to think about with your company and the sort of reputation it has.

David Wolinsky is a freelance writer and a lifelong Chicagoan. In addition to currently serving as IFC’s comedy, film, and TV blogger, he's also a comedy-writing instructor for Second City and an adjunct professor in DePaul’s College of Computing and Digital Media. (He also co-runs a blog behind the DePaul class, DIY Game Dev.) He was the Chicago city editor for The Onion A.V. Club where he provided in-depth daily coverage of this city's bustling arts/entertainment scene for half a decade. His first career aspirations were to be a game-show host.

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