The interview process was very long since I was applying from another country. I had several Skype interviews with 1 or 2 people and then had an in-office interview in Berlin with 6 people split into 3 groups. The skype interviews took about 1 hour each, the in-office interview was about 3 hours long. Overall, I received a very positive impression from Aeria Games and the recruiting manager was great in keeping me updated and making sure all my questions were answered. The questions ranged from business cases to oddball questions: "Calculate whether it would be a good suggestion to increase hostel room prices with 20% if you can get 30% more clientele.", "How would you organise a team and plan a budget to launch a rocket to the moon?"

After sending my application on January 2015, I first received end of March a questionnaire about the position to fulfill and to send back to the HR manager from Aeria games. I’ve been contacted again mid-April to arrange a phone interview a couple of days. First the HR manager apologized that it took so long to arrange the interview. She then asked me from when I could start and as well what would be my salary expectation. (The salary for this position would be around 34 Tsd + quarterly bonus). Afterwards, she gave me some info about to the company and some further detail about the Product Manager position, responsibilities and a brief overview of the organization. After that, she asked me the basic questions you usually can except during an interview: my background, what I’m currently doing and the reason why I applied to this position. She asked me then then if I was a gamer myself and if yes, what kind of games I was usually playing. Last but not least, she’s asked me what I know about the “free-to-play” model, and to quote one advantage and one disadvantage of offering such games instead of “pay-to-play” ones. The whole took around 15-20 minutes. After these questions, we moved to the so-called case study. The first question was: “Imagine you’re taking the management of a Hostel in Berlin. What would you do to double your revenue in 3 months?”. Being as an Hostel Manager is clearly an analogy of being a Product Manager of the free-to-play games Aria games is offering. The focus here is not on numbers or statistics (but it’s the focus of the next question), but more on what kind of strategy you would use to increase the revenue of the hostel. There are probably a lot of good answers, and without detailing what I exactly said, I focused on that 3 main ways supposed to help you increase your revenue: Increase the number of customers, increase the average size of the sale per customer and increase the number of times your customers return and buy again. After, she asked me the second question: “One employee comes to you and tells you: if we reduce the price of our rooms by 20%, we can increase the number of customers by 30%. Question: would the idea of your employee be worth it?” The tricky part about this exercise is that she clearly asked me to NOT use any software (e.g. Excel, Mobile phone) or any calculator to take a decision, but that I could of course use pen and paper to do it. It was actually quite difficult to remember how to calculate without Excel I must say, but positively challenging. (Please see below to have more detail about this question, with exact numbers and answer. I couldn't post it here unfortunately as there's a limitation on the number of characters allowed) She then asked me if it would be worth it in the case we would have 1000 customers instead of 650, but I didn’t have to use any pen or paper this time. It was just to test my “logic” (it was actually quite easy this time to mentally calculate that 1000 x 22 € = 22000 €, so it would be worth it). Last but not least, she told me that in this example the costs were fixed, but asked me if in my opinion the costs were always increasing when the number of customers was increasing too or not. In conclusion, it was a really good and professional interview, even if I had to wait for long time before having it The HR manager was really nice and tried to make me feel comfortable during the whole process, even if the last questions were a bit more stressful and difficult to handle. I think I did quite well during the most of the interview, but I was a bit unprepared regarding the “manual” calculation part of the case study unfortunately, and I think it took me too long to solve it and probably cost me the position. Even though, I keep a quite positive feeling of the interview and the company, and I’ll for sure give one more try later if I find an interesting position to apply for.