What it tests

Real-time crisis communication, de-escalation under pressure, ability to balance transparency with brand safety, and instinct for when to escalate vs. handle independently

Format

1Candidate receives a scenario 10 minutes before: a major outage, a controversial product decision, or a coordinated harassment campaign — with a 'live' mock community thread already in chaos
2For 20 minutes, candidate must respond in real-time to the mock community thread — drafting public posts, direct messages to affected users, and an internal escalation note to the engineering/trust & safety team
3Interviewers play 3-4 different community member personas (angry power user, confused new member, journalist poking around, repeat bad actor) and respond dynamically to whatever the candidate posts
4Final 15 minutes: debrief on decision-making — what they prioritized, what they'd do differently, how they'd run a post-mortem

What to look for

Do they acknowledge the issue quickly and publicly before they have all the answers — or do they go silent waiting for a perfect statement?
Can they calibrate tone across different personas: firm with the bad actor, empathetic with the confused user, neutral and factual with the journalist?
Do they know when the situation exceeds community management and requires legal, comms, or engineering escalation?
Red flag: defaulting to copy-paste corporate boilerplate instead of authentic, human communication

Adaptation guide

Use a real incident from your company's history (anonymized) as the scenario — candidates who've done their research will recognize the shape of the problem. For B2B communities, swap the outage scenario for a controversial product deprecation that affects power users.

Full description

Format:

Candidate receives a crisis scenario 10 minutes before the interview — outage, controversial decision, or harassment campaign
20 minutes of live response: candidate drafts real-time community posts, DMs to affected members, and an internal escalation note
Interviewers actively play different community member personas — angry user, confused newcomer, lurking journalist, repeat bad actor — and respond to everything the candidate posts
15-minute debrief on prioritization decisions, what they'd change, and how they'd run the post-mortem

Time: 45 minutes

What to look for:

Do they go public with acknowledgment before having all the answers, or go silent?
Can they hold different tones simultaneously across different member personas?
Do they know when to escalate beyond community management?
Red flag: corporate boilerplate instead of human communication

Adaptation: Use an anonymized real incident from your company's history. For B2B communities, replace the outage with a product deprecation affecting power users. Scale the number of interviewer personas to match the seniority of the role.