I learned of the opening through an on-line advertisement, which I noted at the time was very poorly written. It was primarily a laundry list of bullets that they wanted in the candidate, and appears they had been written as they came off the top of someone’s head. Regardless, when the offer came to interview locally, I decided to accept, if only for interview practice. The interviewer was the person responsible at the time for Asia-Pacific, along with his personal assistant. It was the typical interview – go over my experience, why are you interested in working for Panduit, etc. After an hour, we adjourned. Several weeks later, I was invited for a panel interview in Singapore. This was a much more professional process – 3 hours of grilling by a panel of 5 people, including the original interviewer. Here they pretended to use a Top-Grading approach to interviewing that they called CIDS. I forget the exact meaning of CIDS, but it’s a fairly standard set of interview questions that aim to dig down to your core competencies and tendencies. But, like everything at Panduit, it’s only something that’s skin-deep. I had already obtained a copy of CIDS and knew exactly what to expect for questions. The same about Top-Grading – I knew from others that the A-P person had read the book and cherry-picked certain themes from the program, but that he didn’t have a clue about how to implement it or actually utilize it to lead his team. Regardless, after 3 hours I was on my way and received an offer several weeks later, which was grossly shy of what I had communicated as my bottom-line during the interview process. After a great deal of haggling, I reluctantly accepted the position, which I certainly regretted not long afterwards.