Interviews

[zilch]

Given that if you're looking for full-time positions or summer internships after this academic year the search is already underway and it may already be interview season for some of us. It may be beneficial to share experiences and read about others and get a feel for what tricks HR has up their sleeves these days.

The trend with interview cycles recently has been to have multiple rounds and each interview focus on specific aspects. The first round seems to always be a general interview and later rounds will be technical, behavioral and case interviews (if applicable).

I had an experience where if you had made it all the way to the end, you would've gone through 12 interviews, I didn't make it anywhere near the end but it still took a lot out of me and it was really annoying having to balance interview prep on top of school and everything else.

Anyone have questions/thoughts/insight on the interview process nowadays?

[meche]

for engineering interviews:

it ranges quite a bit. Where did you interview? 12 is really the upper limit of the range. I've had everything from a phone call with a job offer from my resume only, to a 2 day long interview with HR, individual engineers, and a presentation to a group of engineers, with a mix of many different technical questions. I also had 4 1-hour long interviews with one company, in which I never got a single technical question.

The most common interview seems to be a stage 1 interview of half an hour, mostly resume screening and personality based, maybe one or two technical questions. If you pass it you'll have a 4-hour or so on-site interview with the team you'll be working with.

almost all interviews ask you to explain a project you have worked on before. then the questions are split based on the company. some will mostly aim at determining your personality and motivation. others will look at how much specific knowledge of the field you have and ask for equations. others will try to see how good of an understanding you have of your field, and ask conceptual questions knowing you can just look up the equations if you know which ones to look up.

Edited March 11, 2011 by meche-anon

[starmaker]

I just went through the interview process (for permanent jobs, not internships). I saw a range of interview styles, but the most common pattern was:

Step 1 - 20-40 minute phone interview, usually with a technical person, but sometimes with HR.

Step 2 - Full-day in-person interview, interviewing with 6-10 separate people at 40-60 minutes/person, possibly with a research talk.

Some places had either a second phone interview or a second in-person interview, though usually not both. A couple of places also had in-depth at-home programming tests.

The in-person interview at one place was 10 different people plus an hour for me to give a research talk to all-comers, and lasted nearly 9 hours. I was ready to fall over by the end of the day, and then I had to go to class!

For one of my phone interviews, the interviewer expected me to be at a computer with a C++ development environment and screen-sharing technology. As we talked on the phone, he sent me code and problems to work on, and I was supposed to solve the coding problems (while he watched what I was doing on the screen using the screen-sharing program) while explaining my thought process to him over the phone. That one was a [expletive] disaster. I don't have a headset for my phone, and I discovered that trying to hold a phone, talk intelligently on it, and type code intelligently, all simultaneously, is not one of my strengths.

The questions that I got usually involved talking about my skills and/or past experiences in detail. And what I could bring to the relevant group. Most of my interviews didn't have a lot of code-on-a-whiteboard questions. There was one where I had 15 minutes to sketch out a design for a radar system on a whiteboard, and then had to explain my design and the various decisions that I made, which was actually sort of fun.

Edited to add: If you're interviewing at a medium-sized or large company, I highly recommend checking out Glassdoor.com to see if anyone has posted any interview experiences for that company. Especially interview experiences for job titles that resemble the one you're interviewing for. It might be worth looking at for a small company as well, but there aren't likely to be as many people posting about a small company.

Edited March 13, 2011 by starmaker

[mlle]

I'm in a completely different field (social sciences and public health) than you guys, so my commentary is completely irrelevant to the thread thus far (and yes, I'm still interviewing, almost 4 months after graduating), but I need to vent. Because my degrees can take me into a range of different roles/venues, I've had a range of interview experiences. I get a lot of the godforsaken behavioral interviews, usually for the social science-y jobs. One of those jobs put me through 2 long interviews and ALL of the questions were behavioral, they didn't give a goddamn about my experience or skills, and the job required a fair amount of technical proficiency. They also went ahead and contacted my references and made them write up in-depth reviews of me before I even got to the in-person interview, which kind of annoyed me because if I'm going to be interviewing with a bazillion organizations I don't like my references to be called a bazillion times and get irritated and worn out.

I usually have to submit a writing sample instead of having to chunk out computer code. I've never encountered an organization yet that puts you more than a few rounds of interviews; they'll often haven you interview multiple people (consecutively or at once) but nothing like going back 9 times or whatever, and nothing like an all-day interview. I can barely handle 1 1-hour interview, I think I'd kill myself (speaking figuratively....maybe) if I had to do 9 different interviews or an all-day interview--unless I'm misunderstanding the poster.

I have another interview tomorrow (I'm crawling under my skin), a phone interview in another city 400 miles away, followed by an in-person interview with another place here in town on Monday. And I've just been through 2 "informational interviews" already this week. The first person I talked to had years of experience and said she was looking for a job herself--the grant for her current job is drying up--and was at a loss for what to tell me; she seemed as clueless as I was with regards to "networking" and jobhunting, etc. I don't know how much more of this I can take.

Anyway, I'm starting to ramble again. I'm glad I came across someone's suggestion for GlassDoor. If anyone else who's in my kind of field (or close to my field, or even not in my field at all) has experiences to share, please post and rant recommend, etc. (I'm sure no one will, but I still figured I might put out the request....)