Was referred by a professor to this company and got a call from a recruiter a couple of days after sending in my resume. Scheduled an initial phone interview for that week. Questions were pretty much exactly what you'd expect from an initial phone screen. She went over my resume, asked me why I was interested in CoStar and why I was interested in the commercial real estate industry. The rest were very general questions about how you work in teams, how you feel about having your performance measured, what traits and experiences do you think make you an ideal candidate for this position, etc. This only lasted about 15 minutes at which point she said she wanted to schedule a second phone interview with a manager before bringing me in to the Atlanta office where the position was located.
At this point I took advantage of my opportunity to ask her questions about the bad reviews for the company and specifically the research associate position. She didn't really have any good answers for me. She was deflecting, kept on saying that they are "taking on a new philosophy" in their Atlanta office. Problem is, she could not articulate that alleged change for me at all and many of the poor reviews I've seen are recent reviews from people in the Atlanta office. When I asked if they had any kind of interview or survey system to garner feedback from their current employees, she said "um...we have an exit survey." Red. Flag.
If I hadn't been referred, I probably wouldn't have bothered with the second phone interview but I went ahead and did it. It felt like a carbon copy of the first interview, save for a few additional technical questions about my experience working with databases and spreadsheets and my experience communicating over the phone with customers. I declined to fly to Atlanta to continue the interview process in person because it was clear to me that this position was simply not for me. It's a glorified telemarketing position where you cold call a bunch of property managers and brokers who don't want to talk to you to try and get information for the database out of them...all while being measured by a metrics system based on how many of your calls last over 2 minutes.