I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Northrop Grumman (Redondo Beach, CA)
Interview
The process was pretty long... I would recommend applying to various other places while you wait because it may take a while before you get a call.
I applied in October then got a call back from HR asking for an in phone interviews 2 weeks later and they gave me a specific time and day, so there was no surprise there.
2 weeks later I got a call from one of the hiring managers. He asked pretty basic questions. for example:
- tell me about yourself
-what do you know about this company
-what interests you about this company
-given that i am a mechanical engineer they asked why was i interested in an Aero Engineering position. This caught me off guard only because the job description didnt really say it aerospace position rather they gave a vague and general description, but still no big deal.
-what CAD software packages was i familiar with
stuff of that sort... real simple questions, no technical or analytical questions. After that, they would call me back if interested. And they did. Almost 3 weeks later, late November an HR rep called me and asked if would come in and when i was open for an in person interview. And we scheduled something a week later.
IN PERSON INTERVIEW:
I met with 6 representatives (managers and people i would work closely with). They split the interview in to two separate sessions ( session1, lunch with people you would work with, session2, and tour of the facility). One thing I would like to emphasize is that both sessions asked almost the exact same questions. It was pretty repetitive so it made things quite simple. Also, whatever they asked me in phone was exactly, to a certain extent, what they asked me in person. But i was also asked, additional behavioral question. My examples or at least the ones i recall:
-What was the last project you led, and what was the outcome?
-how do you deal with difficult teammates?
-give me an example of a time that things went wrong and how did you handle it?
-what do you expect from your employers and this position?
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I don't think the questions were difficult. some caught me a little by surprise, but i cant recall which ones. Nothing to difficult that one cant recover if you practice enough.
What i was more interested in was the type of technical questions they would ask me. In other interviews they asked me to solve certain theoretical problems and analyze certain things, but not here.
The questions were mostly all behavioral. There was 1 question where they just wanted me to describe a project. They wanted to know how I approached the problem, what resources I used, if I ran into any problems and how I overcame them.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The questions were mostly all behavioral. 1 question just wanted me to describe a project.
Pretty easy and the questions were pretty basic and it was cool and I got an offer and everything was straight forward only one panel interview which is rare these days.
My engineering interview went really well! I answered all their technical questions confidently, and we had a great discussion about my projects. The people were nice and the conversation went well as a whole.