I interviewed for Google GCP Customer Engineer position and was rejected due to my borderline (per recruiter) performance in the General Cognitive Ability (GCA) section of the interview. My interview (three of them) was done over hangout and because I did very well in the other two sections of the interview (Leadership and Role Related Knowledge), I was given an opportunity to the GCA a second time but was rejected as I was told I only showed little improvement from the first one. Just curious to know how others prepared for this GCA or if there are any relevant resources to help prep for it. Or better still, what are GCP interviewers really looking for from the candidate? Just for context, the question I was asked was a basic classic business problem and I was surprise that even with my MBA degree, my analysis and thought process were not good enough.
@nsw288 - Your observation is very much inline with my experience about the interviewers’ attitude specifically for the GCA. The first GCA interviewer seem irritated and kept changing the objective of the question several times. The second GCA interviewer was not helpful either. What is a good wait time to apply for a different role?
So in GCA interview, they ask case questions ? Like in management consulting interviews?
Yes, they do but they won’t provide you any fact/data like that of management consulting case.
Agreed with @skento. McKinsey, Deloitte and Google all asked questions that required a detailed breakdown but the diff was that Google didn’t provide or confirm basic data. It seemed more about wanting to explore my thought process and see how thoroughly I explored potential solutions to the problem. I freaking love these kinds of questions. Parenthetically, every bad manager I’ve ever had would have failed a really rigorous GCA interview. A thorough GCA interview will push you a bit—to see if you stay cool, give up, get visibly annoyed, etc. Very useful tool for measuring shit most candidates would otherwise try to hide.
I had the same experience in my first GCA. However, I showed "significant/remarkable" improvement in my second one after a prep session with my recruiter. They're trying to match me to a team to do an on-site or have me do another RRK since the slot I was interviewing for got filled. The point of the GCA is to do the scientific method for the answer, I stated all of the questions I needed data from and asked what I could assume before coming up with my answers. Then I took a couple minutes to make two solutions before discussing each with their pros/cons, why I would pick one over the other, long-term v short-term, and how I would measure the success as well as mitigate possible issues that could arise. I would definitely say that you need to follow your receuiter's advice for the GCA. They want to see how you consider all the factors then form your solution and justify it.
Thanks for the details. It’s comforting to know folks had to take the GCA more than once. Would be interesting to see what method or approach others took to scale through the GCA.
I actually had three cases in my 45 minute GCA, although I went into risks, assumptions, testing plan, scaling plan and kpis for my solutions I still failed this round and the recruiter is trying to get me another shot. Kind of perplexed - the questions were general scenarios (e.g. “How would you decide when to hold your next staff meeting?”), not management cases where I could build a cost model or anything concrete like that. Not sure what the interviewer is looking for, if not what I described above.
Your problem was the same as my first failed one, it is NOT a technical cognitive test. It's almost exactly like a consulting case interview. A good opener to the question "How would you decide when to hold your next staff meeting?” could have been "What are the key drivers for holding this meeting?" "what important timing factors/dates should be taken into consideration" "What assumptions and principles are important to decide the prioritisation criteria of each of these timing factors?" Use a MECE principle for enumerating you speculative list of these questions you've asked. The interviewer might ask a follow-up question like "how would you measure the success of your meeting scheduling?" and you can/should probably pre-empt them by already having listed your conflicting constraints and prioritisation criteria, as well as having asked initially for the metrics that have driven the meeting in the first place.
I also was made to do the GCA twice. I suggest researching "interviewer led consulting case interviews". It was studying for Bain-level consulting interviews that made me ace the GCP. the second time around. I actually loved it, I'd do another interview like that anytime. I suggest you pirate on Lib Gen the book from Victor Cheng on consulting case interviews.
Are you talking about the book called “ case interview secrets” by Victor Cheng? What other prep materials did you use for GCA?
Can you give some sample questions for the GCA?
“Where should Walmart open a new distribution centre?” “You’re tasked with improving market share by 3%, how would you do this?”
Anyone else with more sample questions ? I have my GCA interview in 2 days for Customer Engineer role. Any reference for questions and sample questions will help. Thanks in advance
@mastana: how did it go? Any questions you can share ?
I’m preparing for Customer Engineer Infra role and have CGA round coming up. I’m super nervous with GCA. I want to know if I’m on the right track to answer GCA hypothetical questions. So from what I read they want to know how you problem solve and handle ambiguity. So, first I need to clearly understand the question, identify double meaning and overall intention, see what data is missing and distill what’s ambiguous, ask clarifying questions, incorporate any response or feedback from interviewer, make and communicate assumptions, then problem solve on the fly and talk high level about two potential solutions aka framework and ask the interviewer again for leads to narrow your solution. Then keep exploring the solution making sure to talk about Pros/cons and how to measure success. Am I missing anything? Any tips?
Hi amazon, How did you GCA round go? I have mine coming up
I’m still waiting for results. I think I did okay on GCA but surprisingly not well on RRK. The whole interview is very vague with wide open questions. For GCA I had 2 hypothetical questions and 1 behavior on how I handle problems and priorities. The RRK was mostly sales, basic cloud consulting questions like explain cloud benefits and a white boarding session.
Da fuq is a customer engineer? Da fuq is general cognitive ability lol, it sounds like a dumb iq test