Back in January 2012, I was referred by a colleague of my friend for a position outside of Virginia. I was contacted by the talent recruiting manager who, incidentally, thought there are more matching opportunities available for me at their D.C. office.
Two days later, the talent manager called and asked a few questions regarding my background, my career path I was hoping to take on (I was in between career transition), my previous salary range and the length of my employments. He mentioned that he will try to find someone to do a technical screening interview with me.
10 days later he called me to set up a phone interview. I found out later that he had entirely forgotten to communicate with me about an interview he had set up on that same day he had called; so now he was trying remedy the miscommunication by rescheduling it with the same person. Great! He was indeed apologetic about it which I totally understand; things happen.
I got a phone call as expected a few days later, and I talked with a "man-in-a-coma" who I could barely decipher what he was saying. He tried to ask me several technical questions which, in my opinion, were poorly constructed and very sporadic. Nonetheless, I hammered away thinking to myself that his nonchalant, and almost moribund, enthusiasm was a sign of disinterest. To this day, for the life of me, I don't know the name of the interviewer.
A few days later, I received a call from the talent manager that he was going to set up an on-site interview at their Arlington office. I was told that I will be going for a general interview (no particular position, just to see if I would be a fit within the company).
On the day of the face-to-face interview, we were ushered in to a conference room by the recruiting coordinators and were given an orientation by a director which took about 20 minutes, accompanied by a Q&A session about the consulting/public side of the company.
Up to that point, I did not know which division I was being interviewed for which was unsettling. I didn't even know who I was going to interview with, what position I was being sought for, what kind of qualifications or preparations I had to do... I was intentionally kept in the total dark.
At the end of the orientation, we were individually placed in a small conference room and were told to wait for three people to join us to conduct three 30-minute long interviews. My first interview happened to be with the director who was responsible to see if the candidates "culturally" match their teams. I did well with her, and she took an interest in my background which was very distance from consultancy in the technological domain. I sensed that she was a bit unease, and for someone who is introverted, I took it upon myself to warm her into my "narrative." She fired a few very broad questions and allowed me to take over the wheel. I managed to squeeze as many good qualifications into my examples to portray myself as a suitable candidate.
I had read quit a bit about the past and current employees' views on the internal dynamics of the company, mostly kvetching about the emergence of toxic personalities due to the "Survival" style alliances formed because of the way the evaluations are structured. I paid close attention to see if I could detect any spoor of such characteristics, especially in the director, but couldn't unearth much. I asked a few questions at the end; requested her business card, and the 30 minutes was up.
The second round was a case study. A case study? Nobody had told me about any case study! An extremely sharp, well spoken, and analytical senior technical consultant walked me through the process which he entirely abandoned from the get go. He read the case study and immediately unloaded a volley of never-ending questions -- it totally threw me off. Every time I attempted to collect my thoughts to answer his questions and tried to analyze the subtext from the various angles, he would cut me off to throw a curve ball.
Not being familiar with the concepts of business analysis, and the overall topic of the presented problem, I found myself relying mostly on dissecting the issue from an unconventional approach. I was sure I had done poorly on this part of the interview process. I really admired how he tried to guide me by maneuvering my handicapped answers through his exploratory questions. At some point, I realized that he is a type of person that rather the candidates do not evade his inquiries by resorting to mindless deviation from the crux of his gist. So, I tried to directly address his concerns which of course encouraged him to come up with a more complicated scenarios. It was his job to stab my brain, and I understood that.
(continued down below...)
