If there was a way to understand what your customers and prospects are thinking, it would be a lot easier for your sales reps.
Because you can’t read your leads and accounts’ minds, you can still learn useful things from them when you talk to them. Itâs a skill your salespeople can develop and use to better serve your client base.
You can get information straight from the source with open-ended questions, which you can then use to improve the buyer’s journey and keep more customers.
Now let’s talk about what this is all about and how you can use open-ended queries to learn more about your customers.
Interviewing at Sendoso can be an exciting yet nerve-wracking experience As a leading personalized gifting platform, Sendoso only hires the best of the best Doing well on your Sendoso interview means standing out from a highly competitive applicant pool.
The good news is that while Sendoso interviews are challenging, they’re also predictable. Sendoso recruiters tend to ask certain types of questions consistently across candidates applying for similar roles. Understanding these common Sendoso interview questions can help you craft winning answers that impress your interviewers.
In this article, we’ll overview:
- The Sendoso hiring process and interview format
- Most frequent Sendoso interview questions with sample answers
- Tips for crafting your own exceptional answers
- Strategies to prepare for Sendoso coding interviews and assessments
Let’s get started!
Overview of the Sendoso Interview Process
The Sendoso interview process typically follows these key steps:
1. Initial Screening Call
After submitting an application, you may have a brief 30 minute phone screening with a Sendoso recruiter. This is a chance for the company learn more about your background and assess your communication skills. Be prepared to walk through your resume and asked questions about your experience, skills, and interest in Sendoso.
2. Technical Phone Interview
For engineering roles, the next step is a 45-60 minute technical phone screen focused on coding fundamentals and computer science concepts. Come prepared with your preferred coding language. You may be asked to code out solutions to algorithmic problems.
3. On-site Interview
Candidates who perform well on initial screens are invited to Sendoso’s offices for 4-6 rounds of in-person interviews. This on-site loop involves both technical and behavioral interviews and lasts 4-5 hours.
4. Technical Assessment
Some roles also require completing a remote technical assessment after the on-site, like a coding challenge or take-home project. This evaluates your hands-on skills.
5. Decision
Sendoso aims to get back to candidates within 1 week after the on-site interview with a hiring decision or request for references. Top candidates may receive an offer 1-2 weeks after the final interview.
Most Common Sendoso Interview Questions and Answers
Now let’s look at some of the most frequently asked Sendoso interview questions, along with tips on how to ace your answers:
Top Behavioral Interview Questions
Sendoso uses behavioral interviewing techniques – asking about your past experiences to gauge how you might perform in the future. Come with stories that convey relevant skills.
1. “Tell me about yourself.”
- Focus on highlights relevant to the role – 1-2 minutes max
- Start with a brief overview of your current position
- Include a factoid to make you memorable and stand out
- Emphasize skills that align with Sendoso’s values like teamwork
Example: “I’m currently a Project Manager at XYZ Company leading a team of 5 engineers. We recently launched a customer portal that increased satisfaction scores by 15 points. I thrive on finding solutions for clients and enjoy building collaborative, high-performing teams.”
2. “Why do you want to work at Sendoso?”
- Show you understand Sendoso’s products and mission
- Share why you find Sendoso’s gifting technology personally compelling
- Demonstrate enthusiasm for the company’s culture and values
Example: “Sendoso’s product has so much potential to transform business gifting and bring meaningful connections to digital experiences. I would love to join a mission-driven, collaborative team improving the way companies build relationships.”
3. “What is your greatest strength?”
- Choose a strength relevant to the role
- Provide a specific example demonstrating this strength in action
Example: “I’m a natural problem-solver. For example, when our team was behind on a product launch, I dug intousage data to find pain points and proposed a new notification feature to address them. My solution helped us ship on time.”
4. “Describe a time you faced a conflict at work. How did you handle it?”
- Share a real conflict and resolution, focusing on listening and constructive solutions
- Demonstrate emotional intelligence and accountability
- Emphasize teamwork, if possible
Example: “When I felt a team member wasn’t pulling their weight, I approached them 1:1 to understand their perspective. By listening, I realized they felt unsure where to focus their efforts. I worked with them to map out priorities and check-in more regularly. This rebuilt trust on our team.”
Common Technical Interview Questions
For engineering and technical roles, Sendoso asks more technical questions to assess your hard skills.
1. “Explain how you would design a gifting feature on a platform like Sendoso.”
- Show your technical breadth and ability to design complex features
- Clarify requirements and considerations like personalization, inventory, and delivery
- Map out core components and relationships in the database schema
- Analyze potential performance issues and how to optimize speed and scalability
Example: “First, I would need to understand requirements around customization, sending limits, delivery methods, and analytics. I’d likely design profiles for senders, recipients, and gifts with MongoDB documents…”
2. “How would you go about debugging an issue in production?”
- Show structured, methodical debugging approach
- Cover steps like reproducing the bug, examining logs, adding instrumentation, and applying hypotheses
- Demonstrate you understand diagnosing issues in real-world systems
Example: “I would reproduce the issue, then check logs for error messages and stack traces pointing to the malfunctioning component. I’d add debug logging to capture more granular diagnostics. If the issue is across services, I’d trace requests through dispersed logs…”
3. “Describe how you would design a URL shortening service like TinyURL.”
- Show how you break down complex systems and focus on key use cases
- Discuss considerations like generating unique IDs, routing requests, and performing lookups
- Analyze bottlenecks and how you’d optimize performance at scale
Example: “I’d start by roughing out core functions like encoding long URLs into short codes and decoding short links. To optimize lookups, I’d use a hash table mapping codes to URLs. To handle scale, I’d shard the table across servers and CDNs…”
4. “What tradeoffs would you make when designing a distributed system versus a monolithic application?”
- Demonstrate deep systems design knowledge
- Cover availability, reliability, scaling, debugging, flexibility, complexity, and coupling
- There are reasonable pros/cons on both sides – don’t claim one is always better
Example: “Monoliths have simplicity by consolidating logic in one place. But distributed systems improve availability through redundancy and scalability via independent services. There are also tradeoffs around resilience, team coordination, and debuggability that I’d consider based on requirements…”
Questions About You and Your Experience
Expect more questions about your background tailored to the specific role.
For product and program management roles, be ready to talk about:
- Past projects – Your scope, stakeholders, challenges and results
- Strategic thinking – How you identify problems and prioritize solutions
- Cross-functional collaboration – Working with engineers, designers, and leadership
- Agile methodologies – Experience with frameworks like Scrum or Kanban
- Analytical skills – Measuring success and evaluating data to make decisions
For engineering roles, expect questions covering:
- Past technical projects – Design decisions, tradeoffs, architecture
- Coding skills – Proficiency in languages like Python, JavaScript, React
- System design – Designing components like APIs, microservices, databases
- Engineering collaboration – Working on agile teams with designers, PMs, and leadership
- Performance optimization – Load testing, bottlenecks, tuning
- Engineering leadership – Mentoring junior engineers, promoting best practices
For sales and account management roles, expect questions on:
- Previous sales experience – Responsibilities, quota, closing deals
- CRM experience – Tools like Salesforce
- Sales processes – Prospecting, developing leads, presenting, closing
- Client relationships – Building partnerships, strategic focus, resolving issues
- Persuasion and influence – Getting buy-in across stakeholders
- Analytics – Reporting on performance indicators like pipeline
7 Tips for Acing Your Sendoso Interview
Beyond preparing answers, here are some overarching strategies to shine:
1. Research the company thoroughly – Understand Sendoso’s products, mission, culture, and competitors. Visit their careers page and Glassdoor.
2. Review the job description – Focus your preparation on the required and preferred qualifications.
3. Polish your stories – Craft compelling stories using the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result). Time yourself to keep answers concise.
4. Practice aloud – Rehearse answering questions out loud until the
False Open-Ended Questions to Watch Out For
When you’re making a list of open-ended questions for sales, you need to avoid making up bad ones. These are questions that seem open but arenât.
For instance, a½Were there any problems you wanted to talk about?a At first glance, it seems like it could go in any direction. But the person on the other end can easily answer this with a yes or no. This means that if you don’t push the conversation forward, it might end there (especially if the customer says no).
It would be better to ask, “What are some of the problems you’ve been having lately?”
This isnât a simple yes or no question since itâs asking them to explain their situation.
When to Ask Open-Ended Sales Questions
Open-ended questions can help in a variety of sales scenarios. It can assist with sales prospecting, as well as grow relationships with current accounts. For those who ask the right questions, it can even lead to new ways to reach out to and help your customers.
Remember, the goal is to make learning about your leads and accounts painless. So the idea is to make it feel natural vs. like pulling teeth.
The best time to use open-ended sales questions is when you need to:
- Qualify a lead youâre pursuing
- Learn pain points and needs of a prospect or customer
- Understand the benefit your product/service will have for them
- Find out objections and hurdles
- Discover how their process works
- Find out how a customer liked your product so you can upsell or cross-sell to them.
- Get to know the account by asking about its problems and top priorities.
This isnât an all-inclusive list of ways to use open-ended questions for sales. It should, however, help you think of ways to use them to help your business and your clients.
When coming up with questions, just keep the following in mind:
- As you get answers, ask more specific questions (think of an upside-down pyramid). Let’s start with broad questions.
- Be a good listener and show curiosity.
- Personalize it and stay away from general questions that sound like they were planned. natural and genuine.
