I applied on Zip Recruiter, and received an email first asking me to interview by phone. I did so, and it was with a young woman who asked several questions about my background and experience. She did not seem very technical, but seemed to be reading from a list of questions and taking notes on my answers.
After that interview was over, there were several days of no contact. About a week or so later, I was contacted again, and interviewed again by the same young woman, but this time she conferenced in a technical employee who was "out in the field" working at a client location. The phone call quality made the interview more difficult, and there were technical issues that were blamed on their new phone system. Some of the questions were similar to the original interview, but more thoughtful follow up questions were also asked.
Again, another week or so later, I was invited to come in for a face to face interview. I arrived on time and waited several minutes in the main office where a couple of employees were working in their cubicles. The lobby/waiting area is part of the same big room where everyone works. There seemed to be 6 cubicles total. Eventually the young lady I spoke with on the phone came in from a different office and escorted me back out of this office and to another that was behind an electronically locked door. I was taken into a conference room and left there to wait for my interviewer to arrive. Eventually the owner of the company came in, joined by one of his employees, and the interview began. After a few normal introductory questions, they started to lay in with the more technical questions, trying to test my scope of knowledge. The owner is clearly in technical sales, so has a good general grasp of technologies, and the employee he brought with him was the technical lead, as he asked the tougher questions. We were then joined by the same person who interviewed me earlier from the field.
They all seemed rather unprepared to interview me. They were trying to come up with technical issues to ask me to solve. It seemed that these were issues that they all found very challenging themselves to solve, and wanted to see if I could give them the solution without the benefit of time and troubleshooting that they had. I found their questions to be unfair and poor test of my skills or experience. At least one of these questions was asked in a way that made me think that the problem they wanted me to solve was a current issue they were having trouble with. After a short dialog on the problem and what I might do to troubleshoot it, their lead tech shook his head and said something that my ideas were good ideas. It seemed like I had just helped them solve a problem for one of their clients while I was interviewing!!!
Another several days later, I got another phone call fro the same young lady who told me that "the guys" thought I had good experience and interpersonal skills, but that my skills were not quite up to where they wanted to see them for the position I applied and interviewed for. They wanted to know if I would be interested in working on the help desk instead. She emailed me the job description for that role. If I was interested they would then begin a background check before offering me the job.
The background check took longer than normal for some reason, and when I followed up and asked about it, I was told that background checked usually come back quickly if there are no problems on it, and did I want to disclose anything I haven't yet told them? Wow. Well the background check eventually came back squeaky clean, and so then the job offer will issued for $25,000 less than the position I interviewed for.
