First an HR rep. calls you and asks if he or she can schedule a phone interview between you and the relevent hiring manager. They asked that it be scheduled in the next few days. The morning of the phone interview, the HR rep called about 15 minutes before the scheduled time and told me the hiring manager was tied up and could he call me back later that day.
During phone interview the hiring manager asked about past experience, skill sets, etc. A day or so after this interview, the HR person called back and asked if she could schedule another phone interview, this time with 3 engineers from the test group. They called right on time. Asked the typical questions, mostly technical questions related to the exact technology they were working on. Ex. Labview, RF impedence matching, s parameters, and use of the Smith chart. Also asked about experience doing gage R and R tests.
Everyone from the company was very professional and friendly. During the interview, i stumbled on the smith chart and s parameter questions, but I explained I would need to go back and refresh, do to the number of years that had gone by since I'd used those.. Before I heard back from the company with their decision, I went back and refreshed my memory on the Smith and s params. It took a whole of about 30 minutes. I dropped a friendly email to the Hiring manager, thanking him for taking time to interview me and stating that I had taken the initiative to refresh on those 2 subjects. It didn't do any good. About a week later I got the boilerplate rejection email. My advice to other candidates would be to request an in person interview, as the phone interview process can cause miscommunication, and they don't give you a second chance. I have 30 years of hands on electrical / electronics experience, I even helped run the test department for a large company for 5 years in the late 1990's. I could have done the job they were hiring for in my sleep, but somehow was less than successful comunication that over the phone. Good luck.
