I recently posted about a recruiter emailing me and the process on how to find as much info about the company as you can before talking to the recruiter. After going through that whole story, I was given an interview.
Instead of a document to help research offers and recruiters, I take you step by step through my process of interviewing, email Q&A and testing. You’ll get a feel for how stressed I was, how hopeless the situation seemed and the final outcome (and as of writing half of the experience, I still don’t know the outcome…)
Why The Recruiter?
I chose the recruiter because of a few things, but mainly because they could sell me better than I could sell myself. I wanted the interview dammit!
The recruiter could polish up my resume better than I could and custom tailor it to what I want. After talking with “Sally”, I talked to the lead recruiter in her office, I’ll call him “Bob”.
Talking with “Bob” was interesting. He sounded like a used car salesman for resumes - seriously. He was a fast talker. “Bob” talked me up a little bit, quizzed me a tad and went from there. After that, “Bob” said he as updating my newly updated resume. I had bent it more toward a coding background than IT. “Bob” flattened it and turned it into a diamond ring. He took out some serious stuff like me being the team lead on IT movement for a $24Million facility - something that kinda irked me, but I trusted him. He kept saying “My goal is to make you stand out. They look at this piece of paper for 30 seconds, thats all you get. If you don’t impress them within that time, they move on.” - that statement is exactly why I didn’t go directly to the company.
“Bob” wrote out a general statement about me in the email he sent to the client, which was most of the “About Me” section I sent him. I wrote it in a Geek way, with his, I turned into a Nerd… I didn’t want to fuss, I trusted him. If all else failed, I would go back to the company in a few weeks, submit my own resume and go from there.
“Bob” sent out the resume and asked when I would be available for them to call me. I told them I could be available between an afternoon time period in the clients time zone. I said they could call in the next 2 days and if it was better, even that day. (This got me in trouble with my loving wife).
The Call
The phone started ringing that same night at 2340 (1140pm) and that meant it could be 1 of 2 people. It could be the client or my mother telling me someone had died… Well, I was met with a “HELLO!” from a speaker phone - the client. The recruiter pulled through, I got my interview! Now, it was my turn to impress enough to move through the interview process.
The interviewer was kind enough to pull a team of developers in earlier than expected because of the time that he was calling. I had offered to wait till the required time (I would have waited all night), but he insisted. That told me a lot - they are a nice company that doesn’t mind working around you. Hopefully, this got me a few brownie points too like my last job. (I literally interviewed 2 hours after stepping off an international flight - after a missed flight and 19 hours in the air. I was lucky I could think straight.)
The interviewer asked one question to warm me up “What brought you to Germany?” I gave a quick and dirty reply without too much fluff. He laughed a little and then asked what made me want to move from Germany to “Oregon”. My response, “My wife and I have been talking for awhile and decided we needed an exit strategy for her getting out of the Army and a job like this would allow us to do that, pay some bills, have a little fun and start life back in the US again.”, brought a smile to his face (you can always hear a smile - always)
I was interviewed in a round robin fashion from there with about 5 PHP developers. They mainly stuck to the requirements of the job, XML related protocols, PHP/MySQL (the recruiter loved to call it My Sequel - blah!), my Linux background and what development platform I used.
Now, I’m a down to earth person and I normally do stuff in an interview that most people wouldn’t think about doing. I don’t mind making certain statements. When I was asked how my PHP skills where: 1 being worst, 10 being expert - my response got some nods in the room (ain’t it funny how you can hear these things on a phone - took years of call control and training to be able to do that). My response was “I probably shouldn’t say something like this during an interview, but I don’t believe anyone is an expert at anything. You can always learn something, the language is always changing. I would rate myself around 8, 8.5 since I still learn stuff everyday and learn new techniques everyday.” Now, PolyComm phones are the shiznit - they pick up everything. After saying this, there was a silence but I could still “hear” someone smiling, I could hear someone nodding and the next question wasn’t an attack on my skills, it was the development platform question from above. If I would have shown weakness, they would have gone for it and tried to explore that weakness. If I would have said “Oh, average, about a 7 or 8…” with no explanation, that would have been bad. Being able to get a feel for the personalities in the room, I was able to turn that situation into one that most hardcore developers agreed with - there are no experts.
After all the questions, I was given an option to ask questions myself. I should have asked about their programming platform, which versions of MySQL/PHP they use, etc, but I didn’t want to do that because I knew that the answers didn’t matter if I couldn’t make it past the test. I did say that I had managed to do a lot of research before talking with the recruiter since I found them without the recruiter so I didn’t have too many questions and that I would just respectfully wait. They laughed a little and said they could always use me as a professional researcher and he dismissed the group and let them get back to work.
One other thing that was mentioned made me feel a lot better. There where several positions open, not just one. Whew! That made it easier on my part. I may not be the best coder, but if I stuck out enough and got enough interest, they might bring me in and train me up to speed as it was.
After the meeting, I talked with the manager a little bit and scheduled my test the next day. The test was a timed PHP project that was focusing on PHP, not GUI type stuff and was basically a flow chart (and no, I won’t post it here…) I would have a few hours to work on it and turn it in for grading. After that, we would talk about relocation, etc.
Now, upon further research with little hints in the conversation, I was able to go online and discover they where hiring back in June for the same position - Senior PHP Developer. This had a 10k sign on bonus plus relocation expenses - WOW!
The Test
I technically started writing this before I took the test. I was planning on studying up (cramming) on XML related protocols and PHP, but I needed to unnerve a bit.
I called off from work to take the test since I would have been at work (very bad) and proceeded to cram. I kept the TV off, the radio off, my email shut, the news sites (and Slashdot) off and just confused myself for awhile. This didn’t last long. I’m the type of person that needs to have a reason to waste time (other than looking at news sites).
I ended up trying my best to relax the rest of the day, that didn’t work too much either.
Anyway, when the final time came - nothing. I waited and waited. For an hour, I watched my email, stared at the phone and got nervous. Finally, I called “Bob” to see what the heck was going on.
“Bob” asked me a few questions about the interview and proceeded to tell me that if they where late, they would probably give me extra time to solve the problem. I wasn’t worried about that - I wanted to get the waiting over with. I wanted the nervousness to stop. I wanted to solve this thing, land a job and know how my life is going to play out by the time the weekend rolls around in 32 hours. (grr) Now, on top of all of that, depending on how long it takes me to solve this problem, I may or may not get enough sleep so I can work tomorrow. If, for some reason, this thing shows up at 7 or 8 and I’m supposed to spend 2-6 hours working on it, that can easily make it 2 in the morning before I’m done.
4 hours later and no contact what-so-ever, I gave up. Something obviously happened where I was either no longer being considered or something spooked the Company. I’m a little miffed, but there isn’t much I can do. I’m assuming the hiring manager thought long and hard about Germany and instead of asking me about relocation costs, just tossed me.
The Next Day
The next day, while at work, my wife franticly called me and played a message on the answering machine. The one day I forgot my NIC card for my laptop, caused me lots of problems.
Thankfully, I was able to jet out of work under an “emergency”, sped home to flop down in front of the computer. Opening my email, I have the test as well as a general Q&A for the Company. No, I will not post the test nor will I post the Q&A so don’t ask - sorry…
I will say that this was about equal to my most hardcore programming experience. I spent 2 weeks and about 100 hours working on a CMS back end for a website while unemployed.
Let me tell you, it looked simple, but wow - there was a lot of stuff you had to be creative with. I worked on a FUNCTION for 12 hours - 12 freakin hours people! I honestly think I did a crappy job because when 7am rolled around, I just really didn’t care anymore. After being up for more than 24 hours, I marked off my last bug that I was really concerned about and sent out the email. After that, I crawled into bed. I’m honestly ashamed to say that too - I really want the job, but I’m not one to cause health problems. As it is, my fingers are sore from typing, scrolling, saving (ctrl-A), etc. Heck, it took me all day to even look toward my computer. Thank god I had a local web server to use - I actually developed on it that whole time for fast debugging.
Whats Next
Well, its hard to say. Between my phone interview, resume, Q&A and test, we’ll see what happens. Hopefully, Monday will bring good news, but we’ll see. For now, I’ve adopted the notion that I’m not getting the job. I’m normally an extreme optimist, but have found that getting excited about things in life just causes more problems.
(2 days later) Yup, I haven’t gotten the job. Its Wed and I finished my test on Sat morning. After viewing the file on Sunday, I was ashamed. I knew right there I wasn’t getting the job - the hope is there, but deep inside, I knew I blew it. While I think it was the whole thing of being up for 25 or so hours, I’m not one to beg for a retest because I was tired.
If I don’t hear anything tonight, I’ll make it official and email the hiring manager to verify. I’ll also request the ability to apply in 6 months to a year (whenever their next rehire period is) with the stipulation that I’ll submit a URL or 2 of OSS projects I’m in charge of so they can see what my code looks like when I’m not tired. I’ll also research a lot of the technologies they use in an attempt to brush up on everything they like.
It Official
Due to my horrible job of coding, I didn’t get the job. I had emailed the hiring manager a rather long email, apologizing for wasting his time and explaining why the code looked so bad. I also asked if it would be alright to reapply in 6 months to a year, after working on my obvious deficiensies… Answer:
I appreciate you following up with us. You are correct; we are not going to
be able to offer you a position at this time. We would be glad for you to
reapply at a time when you feel like you’re better prepared. I wish you the
best and thank you for taking the time to respond.
While I wasn’t happy, it still made me feel better to know that it was alright to reapply.
