My initial phone call came from their recruiter out of Harvey IL. Very nice and respectful, apologized in taking so long to reply to the job posting and getting back to me. Wanted to setup a telephone interview with the manager of their equipment services department as soon as possible and while working with me on my schedule this was accomplished. The interview was setup and conducted a day later with a requirement of taking a test.
I was sent an email with a link attached to a test with over 200 questions with I believe had 5 sections. This was not a test to see how many you can get right. The first section was a psychological and behavior profile test. This portion had 142 questions asking you to rate your thinking from strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, strongly agree. All of these questions repeated themselves with the question worded differently, more than 3 times.
There was also a section with about 40 math questions. Expect some simple math up to some fractions word problems, questions pertaining to percentages, order of using brackets and then complex algebra and know your order of math. Then there was another section with about 30 word association. There was more than one question where the expression was written wrong. Example of a question 4*6(10/3(45%*4)). From my memory you would work the 45%*4 as the first order since it is in the inner most bracket, but what are you taking 45% of?
Then a section of about 40 questions asking the association of words and then meaning of certain words. An apple is to a ? As an orange is to a lemon, the answers to choose from would be a grape, a plum, a banana a pear.
The meanings of words went from easy to very difficult. After about the tenth question in this section it became a W.A.G. I had no clue on and being a former technical write and a technician for 40 years I absolutely seen no logical reasoning for this and basically considered it a waste of time. I was not applying for a job as a library science person or an editor.
When I was called for the second telephone interview I spoke to the supervisor of the equipment services department and an electrical engineer. Having a background of over 25 years in industrial machine installation, repair, sustaining, preventative maintenance, modification, decommissioning I felt like I was a good fit for this position.
This interview lasted 45 minutes and the electrical engineer had a heavy accent possible from India and was difficult to understand and also did not seem to comprehend well. He also expected from my experience extreme details on his systems and how you would modify them over the telephone with no prior knowledge of his systems. Considering that you have never seen these systems the best you could do was to try and explain to him how you would modify these systems. He kept correcting my conversation which I felt was very degrading, as I noted I have not seen his systems and felt like this was an absolute disadvantage. On my behalf.
I was asked about my resume stating I had high voltage experience. Again I have 25 years of industrial electrical and electronic experience. I would say that 90% of the machines in the past 25 years I have sustained have operated on 480VAC 3 phase power. I have worked on systems up to 160 thousand volts of power. In addition I have over 8 years of military experience on aircraft electrical systems maintaining everything from the generators to the radar antenna in the United States Air Force. When I explained my knowledge it was not detailed enough, I was asked about the system that use the 160 thousand volts and I explained the operating of the machine. This electrical engineer said well you know your semiconductor physics but did not explain what you know about 480 VAC.
At this time in the interview I almost hung up, I seriously felt like my time was being wasted. It was at this point on the telephone interview I was 100% positive that even if I was offered a position I would have declined it. I did not see the type of leadership that I could work with.
This electrical engineer's failure of communications and listening then knowing how to interview a person on the telephone was totally out of character and unprofessional from my experience.