Most of the initial contact with the company is done via their North Carolina office and can be disjointed. I would prefer using local contacts only. I was contacted by their internal recruiter via LinkedIn, and then replied with resume. I was phone screened by a future peer, and was just asked about my background, about previous jobs I held, etc. This only last 15 minutes. The peer was friendly, polite, professional.
My interview was scheduled, again via NC, very soon after the initial phone screen. I met with approximately five people: hiring manager, and four peers. This interview went mostly well ---- although they seemed to be annoyingly focused on IQ-tests and behavior tests and didn't spend really any time on the actual job at hand! Instead of asking real, practical hands-on questions -- they wasted time with trying to profile me. They asked very few technical questions and then claimed to know the extent of my abilities?
I was brought in a different day for round two, and met with more or less the same people as the first time. This interview was slightly more technical, but was rushed --- giving me little or no chance to reshape their stereotypical rush-to-judgment view of me from the interview before. An outside-the-box attempt to demonstrate some technical skills was unrewarded --- they were not interested and cared less that I put forth the effort.
Everyone involved in the process was friendly, professional, and very nice -- including the local HR girl who explained the culture of the office, etc. With this being said, there's a difference between being nice and being incompetent interviewers. They did a particularly bad job -- a combination of not asking the right questions and playing around in the abstract instead of the concrete practical world.
