Mixed signals, including on whether they'd even be hiring for this role or not. I got conflicting information on what exactly the SSD does during my interviews, and then was given condescending feedback by the recruiter on skills and tasks another SSD had told me were not a part of the role.
The BCGDV work seems really cool and contemporary, and I give them credit for doing so much in the few years they've been around; however, this meant that nearly every person I spoke with had been with the company for less than a year and was also new to the landscape. It was clear that while the team is likely brilliant and made up of very accomplished individuals, that they are still working out the distinctions between who does what, and this kind of miscommunication makes it very hard for a candidate like myself to satisfy every interviewer.
Another thing that was very jarring and I would caution against is that I was told that I'd be presenting my work to a panel of three staffers, but when I arrived only one person was in the office, and the other two people were joining remotely. The screen where I was projecting, the camera, and the phone were all in different spots in the room, and it was very disorienting to know where to look and where to project my voice. It would have been helpful to be told all of this before the interview.
Another review by an SSD candidate below is very similar to the experience I had, in that while they seemed to be asking for one thing (a person focused on bringing human insights to projects), they really wanted something wholly dissimilar in the end (a combination UX designer and venture architect) . In the future, it would help candidates a lot if the current team was more clear about what was and what was not the job of the SSD.
