Interview was conducted by two managers. Throughout the session, there was minimal interaction, and both spent most of the time looking at their screens. It was difficult to assess whether they were engaged. The experience felt impersonal and gave me the impression that they were not very interested in the conversation. No questions about my background were asked, and it felt like a missed opportunity on both sides.

The process took about 3 weeks from start to finish. It began with a screening call with HR, then the hiring manager, and two more phone screens before they set me up for their revered Gallup interview. The phone screens went great, in the standard question and answer format, discussing skills and experience. I felt like the group would be a good fit as well as the job, and even got a bit informal with one of the interviewers while discussing some of the issues this particular job would encounter. However, their Gallup pole, their "main indicator of success," completely inaccurately represented me as an applicant, so it's hard not to be bitter about something that is a go/no-go metric when it gets you wrong and eliminates you from candidacy. As an example, this personality test came back saying my "type" prefers working as part of a group (nope) and I don't like telling people what to do or being a leader (I actually laughed at this when I was told, because that could not be further from the truth). I was honestly surprised and spent a good deal of time examining myself after hanging up the phone before coming to the same conclusion I told the HR woman in the first place: a metric like this, trying to shove people into boxes, is a poor metric. There will always be outliers, there will always be people who lie on these things to move forward, there will always be non-performers even though the test tells you they will be awesome. The best indicator of success should be past performance, and it seems like they rely inordinately on this Gallup poll, which is unfortunate. In the same way applicant tracking systems weed out good employees who don't list enough buzzwords on their resume, this poll is lacking. Oh, and did I mention that if you don't "pass" this interview you will be blacklisted from Stryker? The interview itself is ambiguous and very open to interpretation. Prior to taking the Gallup interview you're told to include all aspects of your life when answering the questions, which I think might be part of the problem, at least for me. I'm a different person at work than at home, as many people are. So when I'm asked whether I like to stay busy all the time, the answer for that is no, because at home I prefer to be low key and relax with my family. Strictly related to work, absolutely, being busy passes the time and I get a bit of a thrill from the stress of keeping things in line. That's the kind of thing that will trip you up, if you are like me. My advice is to not relate the questions to your home life at all if you are the kind of person who has a different "style" at work versus at home, like I do. Basically, they are looking for Type A employees, which is fine. Answer the questions like a Type A would and you'll move on to the next portion of the interview, and you'll likely circumvent this metric. Meeting people in person, getting a feel for the group, those things should carry more weight than what amounts to the professional version of a quiz in a magazine. They claim this metric works (I'm sure they believe this to be true), but I'm wondering how they are quantifying the missed opportunities? The HR woman agreed that there are low performers even with this metric in place, so I'd be curious to find out what professional performance would be if they hired someone who had "failed" this interview.