It’s interesting to hear about the hiring process, both from the perspective of the potential employer as well as employee. Recently, one person I know has been interviewing for engineering jobs and giving me detailed accounts of the experience. He particularly contrasted two experiences.
One job called right away, flew him out for an interview after a quick phone interview, and offered him a position within a week. Another job waited several weeks before calling him; vetted out references; went through phone, in-person, and then another phone interview; and finally sent questionaires to several references.
Obviously the second process was far more stressful than the first. However, I was surprised at the response from my colleague when all was said and done: he said that he felt like the second company really wanted him, while the first was looking for a warm body. It worked out well, as he really wanted to work for the second company, and they also offered him a position. (If he hadn’t wanted to work for the second company, I seriously doubt he would have put up with all that!)
What have your experiences been when looking for jobs? What things did you notice about the interview process that either made you glad or wary about working for a particular company? What advice do you have when going through the process? Please share your thoughts in the comments!
The thing I hated most was filling out online applications that were basically asking me to copy and paste my resume into various fields. And then upload a plaintext version of the resume too. And create a separate user account for each company. All of this knowing I would never hear a single word from a company other than the automated emails thanking me for applying. After 2 or 3 of those I just decided to quit applying to those jobs. It worked out well, 3 co-ops and 2.5 job offers later I never had to fill out a stupid online application. Thinking about my classmates I can’t remember anyone every saying they ever heard back from any company if they fired off an online application.
Thankfully my college hosted a huge Career Fair in the Spring and Fall which gave everyone an opportunity to actually meet hiring managers and engineers face to face and bypass the online process. I probably would have had to suffer through way more online applications than I did if the Career Fair didn’t exist. Even at the fair though you had to be wary; for every company there to actually interview and hire people, there was at least an equal number just there to direct you to their company website. Whenever I found out the HR person I was talking to had no hiring power and was only there to collect resumes and direct people to the website I flat out asked for my resume back.