Candidature

J'ai postulé via une agence de recrutement. Le processus a pris +4 semaines. J'ai passé un entretien à NTT DATA (Arlington, VA (États-Unis)) en août 2017.

Entretien

I applied for this position via a staffing agency. This position supports a federal government agency. I talked to the staffing agency's recruiter, who suggested that I update my resume to clearly indicate how my past experience matched with the lengthy job description. I found the request to make my resume longer a bit unusual, but I submitted an updated resume.

I didn't hear anything for a few weeks, and then out of the blue one day I received a request for a phone interview later that day. Since I generally like to be prepared for my interviews and I hadn't heard anything about this job opportunity for a few weeks, I requested a different day.

The phone interview with the hiring manager (NTT Data employee) primarily consisted of yes/no questions about what I had done in the past (e.g., have I used Tool X, have I created Deliverable Y). The yes/no questions did paint a picture of what it's like to work there.

A few days after the interview, I was asked to come in for an in-person interview with the same hiring manager. The on-site interview was at a secured federal facility, but oddly I was given no directions on how to get there, where to park/how to take the Metro subway, how to get into the building, etc. I was only given an address.

The on-site interview was similar in content to the phone interview. There were a few in-depth questions (walk me through an example of producing Deliverable Y), some yes/no questions (which I thought were repeats of the phone interview), and some more in-depth questions about my background. The federal facility was kind of depressing (e.g., high brown cubicle walls). A few days later I was informed that I was rejected.

I found the job description to be overly long and somewhat duplicative, which made it more challenging to prepare for the interview. From the job description, I feel like NTT Data was looking for someone who was a jack-of-all-trades who could do everything, but the interview focused primarily on producing a few deliverables.

There were a few things I found odd. I found it odd that I never had the opportunity to meet with anyone else on the project team (i.e., my future co-workers) during the interview process (the overall process was laid out to me at the beginning of the process and meeting my future co-workers was not part of the process). I also found it odd that they said they were agile. I'm no agile expert, but as far as I know collecting and prioritizing a set of requirements, and then tossing them over the wall to the developers, never to see the requirements ever again, is not agile.