It's a lot of work, so prepare yourself. I thought I worked hard enough on it and I still bombed.
I was referred to the position by an existing, longterm employee, that I previously worked it. She knew me well and thought I would be perfect for the role. The interview process is multi-step. The first interview being just a casual chat to get to know you and your work history. I wanted to be prepared so I literally wrote out my entire work life story. When the chat happened, I was basically just asked typical interview questions such as "tell me about when you were in (X) role". I told my story and walked the interviewer through my work history. I felt that the interview went well.
Within about 24 hours, I learnt that I was successful and would be moving on to the next step. They call it the "technical" interview, but it's actually referred to as "the gauntlet". I worked extremely hard to prepare for the gauntlet. I wasn't sent any prep material or anything, but I did a ton of research and read through many reviews on here (glassdoor). I created my own shop (DEFINITELY DO THIS), and I practiced the different questions that other interviewers said that they were asked. I watched the how-to videos on the shopify help centre, and made my own notes.
For the technical interview, you're basically doing role play and have to pretend to be the advisor, while the interviewer pretends to be the merchants.
First, you have 15 minutes to help 2 merchants AT THE SAME TIME, via online chat. Keeping in mind, you have to assist these merchants with and you haven't been trained at all yet. So while making friendly chat, and asking the merchants questions to try any find out how to best assist them, you also have to be searching around on the worldwide web for the answers to their questions. It's A LOT to be happening all at once and it's very stressful. If you take too long to respond to the merchant via chat, they start saying "Hello? Are you still there?"
In the instructions, you are recommended to not copy and paste instructions, but to put them in your own words. What they don't tell you, is that you can absolutely copy and paste the link to the help centre that you are instructing from. I unfortunately didn't do this, and lost points because of it.
Also, because of all the juggling and trying to type out what I wanted to say to the merchant, I ended up taking too long and wasn't able to assist the merchants in the time allowed.
I found the phone call with "the merchant" to go a lot easier. First of all, I only had to focus on the one merchant, not 2, and also, I found it a lot easier to connect and multitask while being on the phone, rather than on the 2 chats. I felt like the phone call was going very well, but at one point "the merchant" got lost on the page I was trying to explain to them and it tripped me up. I asked the merchant to hold while I tried to figure out why they weren't seeing what I was trying to explain to them, but as soon as I found the answer, I had run out of time and "the merchant" had to go (i.e. my 10 minutes was up)
Question 1 (online chat): "How do I setup free shipping for local orders?"
Question 2 (online chat): "I created a Contact Us page, how do I put it in the place where I want it to appear?"
Question 3 (phone chat): "How do I close my store?"
All of the step by step answers to these questions can be found on the Shopify help centre. There are also how-to videos that you can watch, but obviously you can't really watch them as you are trying to explain the steps to the merchant. You CAN share the links with the merchant and then talk them through the steps in your own words and explain why you are recommending these steps to them though.
I hope that reading this will help someone in the future. It's a tough interview process for sure, and I am disappointed that I didn't do well enough even though I tried really hard. Guess it's just not meant to be for me.
Good luck to you.
