Instacart seemed like an interesting company, so I decided to apply for a position there in Operations (Corp Office). While the business model seemed cool and a smart thing to come up with for our time, during the interview process and research I quickly realized how poorly run this company is.
First the interview process was very poor, I received an email from the hiring manager saying he loved my resume and want both of us to have an interview. When the call happened the hiring manager was not on the phone, but a recruiter I was never in contact with. The recruiter seemed totally disengaged and did not know much of the role at all and later found that he provided me with incorrect information.
I then had to take 2 “challenges” 1 was a data challenge where they give you a random spreadsheet with data and you have to make sense of the data and generate a presentation with very little background information. That challenge made no sense to me, because having completed many presentations in my life time, how the heck am I supposed to create one with a company I never work for before and still knew nothing of the role to that point. The other challenge was a SQL challenge which made better sense. But I hate when companies give these challenges with no chance to verbally explain your thought process from what you know. And these take time to complete considering you know nothing, they give you a 48 hours limit.
Having passed the challenges I went on to finally interview with the hiring manager, who again seemed very disengaged, while on the interview I could clearly hear him doing dishes and other household chores which I found incredibly disrespectful and I actually became upset while on the call. He seemed more interested in processes and procedures at my current employer than interviewing me, like he was phishing for information and asked for a level of detail in my answers that did not make sense, like all he was here for was to phish for information, which I read happened to another interviewer on here.
After the interview he said I will move on the the NEXT phase which is a panel interview and the recruiter will call with the details. However when the recruiter contacted me it was to say that they were moving on with other candidates. I would say I was a little relieved, in my 20 year career Instacart was the worst company I ever interviewed with, and judging by the company reviews on Glassdoor and shopper reviews on YouTube, this company clearly does not care about their employees and I felt like I dodged a bullet.
If you received an offer and plan to work there, I strongly recommend that you make it a transitional move to get to the next phase of your career, don’t plan on staying there. These so called start ups are a dime a dozen and all usually eventually fail, not because the idea was bad, but because of poor leadership and management. And solely focusing on gaining customers and $$ with out caring for their employees, and who in turn will only see that job as a transitional role instead of a career.
