If you're in the running for a job at Facebook, expect more than one interview. In fact, you might want to prepare for five or 10.
One former Facebook employee tells CNBC he had 17.
"The company put me through the ringer. I think I had 17 interviews to get there," says ChRiS Gomersall, who spells his first name uniquely after the change he made as a kid stuck.
He served as creative strategist for the social media giant from 2012 to 2015. But not first before completing his fair share of in-person, video and phone interviews.
"I thought it's because the position never existed before," says Gomersall. "But then I found out that everybody at Facebook really goes through the same thing."
The lengthy interview process had a clear purpose. In Gomersall's experience, Facebook was intense in its hiring style, but was "very hands off" in its management approach.
"Everything was based on performance and results, rather than hour-by-hour work," he says.
The laissez-faire approach communicated a message: We trust you to deliver results.
The experience of going from a rigorous interview process to a hands-off management environment taught him a crucial lesson: Invest time and effort in interviewing potential employees. Because, once hired, they should be trusted to deliver results.
And he's taken that with him as founder and CEO of Atomized, a company that provides a cloud-based visual content calendar platform to marketing and advertising departments.
"If you're delivering the results and making an impact on the business or the product, it doesn't matter how you get there," he says.
"The results speak for themselves."
