Interviewed here to sharpen my interview skills. Made it to Super Day (Final Rounds) – discovered the company culture was definitely not a fit for me. The full process takes a minimum of three weeks. Round 1: 30-minute phone screen, mostly a cover of the job description and your resume. The recruiter was very pleasant and covered the role in-depth. They made a pretty arrogant comment however: “We like to say if you can interview with Appian, you can interview anywhere” (Just a bit of a high horse). Tip: Absolutely do not be fooled into answering what other companies you are interviewing with – this timeline is none of their business. You get to control the timeline. Round 2: 45-minute zoom call with the hiring manager, mix of resume dive and behavioral questions. Final Round: What Appian calls their "Appian Super Day." This involves a welcome from the university recruiting team, lunch, an executive, and a product demo to start. You are then sent to a conference room for interviews for the majority of the afternoon. Four interviews in total with one for 10-15 minutes, three lasting 20-30 minutes each. Breaks are offered in chunks. The day concludes with a networking event where you can interface with the recruiting team and a few Appian employees. I highly recommend the in-person Super Day over the virtual option. This will give you the opportunity to ask questions of employees who are around and to get a feel for the culture and space. This is definitely not a corporate environment. I raised an eyebrow when some of the executives shared they had been with the company for 15 to 20 some years (Sounds fairly insular) and like to hire/promote from within (This does not help their overly white-male (Especially in upper management) dominated culture become more diverse). There is hope for their diversity issues however as they are hiring a lot of people as they scale (With scaling comes great risk of course as a company can scale far too quickly – keep this in mind if you are looking to stay put for awhile). They like to say they are more like a “startup” where their founders still like to think of it that way (Only some 23 years later…). If you like a small town feel and like being able to know everyone closely, this is the place for you. For those of you who do not enjoy the small town feel, this is definitely not the place for you. They like to emphasize being able to “get to know the personal you.” Seriously consider how much you want people to know about you and for you to know about them in a professional setting. Some of the interview candidates got a little too cozy here. Tip: remember location/building is nice, however personal/company fit matters far more. Seriously think if the “start-up” environment is right for you. Personal questions are none of their business – do not feel pressured into answering them: “What are your hobbies, etc.” Also, it is really not classy and not best practice to applaud Appian for “the free drinks on Appian” at the networking event. Also recognize this is a really clever setup to see who goes wild under the guise of “relaxing” with the alcoholic beverage options. Finally, the Uber credit they give you for the window of the day is for travel to and from HQ. It definitely is an eyebrow-raiser to talk about how you will “use the Uber credit” traveling around town after the interview. Thank you notes are a must for each interviewer at each stage. I encourage you to ask them DEI questions.

First 2 stages were good, but they put a random hiring hold halfway through the process which is very annoying. They were still promoting on LinkedIn at same time too.