I was contacted by a Recruiter who had seen my resume on Monster.com. Initially I was contacted to gauge interest in a Sales position, and then we proceeded to to arrange a behavioral interview via phone call. The first interview was relatively laid back, and I was asked basic questions about my personality traits; i.e. is money an important motivation for you in your work? What type of work environment do you prefer to work in? What are you looking for in a job? What don't you want in a job? - this last one was essentially probing to see what your views are on work to social life ratio.
After the behavioral interview I was asked to come into their Chicago office in order to go through a 3 hour interview process. The office itself had an open floor plan with rows of conjoined desks. Essentially cubicles without the walls to block your view from other employees. The first thing I was tasked with doing was watching a 20 minute video about the company. Following the video I was prompted to take a relatively easy test - consisted of basic questions about who the founder of the company was, where the company was founded, state location, knowledge of time zones, and state abbreviations, and basic math questions - some of these questions were posed in the form of identifying information based off of screenshots from an Outlook inbox. All of the company-related questions can be found on their website so make sure to check it out before entering the interview.
Following the test portion I sat with a Sales Executive trainee. I sat with him for about 30 minutes to gain a sense of what my immediate roll with the company would be. Then I was directed to shadow a full-time broker who had his own book of business established. Be sure to keep track of who you meet - i.e names, their position in the company, what work they were doing when you shadowed them, and be able to provide some feedback about what you thought about the shadowing process in later one on one interviews.
I ended the shadowing experience and met with the recruiter who had initially reached out to me in the first place. We essentially had the exact same conversation as the behavioral phone call with added questions about my resume.
Finally, I met with a sales team leader and the director of HR for my final interview. This interview was where I was asked to speak to the experience I had shadowing the current employees. Being able to apply some positive feedback about the experience and recalling names and info were important. Additionally, I was asked to walk through most of my resume and speak to my accomplishments, failures, adjustments, thought processes in making decisions based on experiences listed in the resume. This interview was mostly formal, but being able to form casual lines on conversation was beneficial. Part of the sales job relies on forming relationships with clients so being able to demonstrate your ability to form connections is beneficial. I had read in other Glassdoor reviews that sometimes the interviewers will tell you that you cannot do the job or that you are not qualified. I did not have this same experience per-say, but I was asked what I would do if I didn't receive a job offer. "Say you go home and see you were not offered the job, what do you do then?" These types of questions are meant to gauge your determination/motivation as a person, but they are also fishing to get your level of interest in working for the company. I was even directly asked on a scale of 1-10 where my enthusiasm for TQL was at. I answered with a 8/9 out of 10, and then was asked why it wasn't a 10. It seemed like they wanted me to give them full commitment to the company without really knowing anymore about them other than the 3 hours I had spent there.
Overall, the people were nice, but there is a high turn-over in the company. Phone sales isn't for everyone, and they want to see if you are someone who can handle the hard hour and phone calls. Also, they want someone who sees this job as a way to progress their own self-wealth/worth. Go-get-it attitude, hard work, and all the other generic corporate sales mentalities apply to this position.