Online application and received a notification of receipt and review within 1 day. Email and phone contact within 4 days of the application, a short phone interview and then a request to interview in person.
As I was already planning on being in the area, we set up and had the interview 6 days after I sent the application. So over all my experience was that it was a very fast / efficient process for myself i.e. someone fairly close to their business location.
The first portion of the on location interview lasted about 30 minutes and was with Mr. Jamieson, who was the same person I had spoken with over the phone. To a large degree it was a re-hash of what we had discussed in the prior phone conversation. That is to say, my prior experience and what I was looking for in a permanent position ( I have primarily been a private consultant over the past decade ).
During the second part a pair of their engineers came in and asked a variety of questions - again initially focusing on prior experience though their focus seemed to be more on the technical aspects though. Questions were along the lines of specific duties in prior jobs bringing new hardware designs up and my level of comfort with Linux both on the programming and administration side of things. A primary interest seemed to be concerned with the variety of processors I had worked on along with how close to the silicon I had been working. This ran the gamut from basic DDR controller to TWI / SPI / I2C and other functionality.
One set of questions that did throw me for a loop was in regard to fixed point DSP programming ( Q format ). I had come into the interview acknowledging a deficiency in the DSP side of things which is why the question came as a surprise. So in all honesty, I was at a complete loss for an answer to the question and simply reiterated my lack of experience in that area. The engineer that asked the question did not appear to be engaging in one upmanship or anything of the sort. He just seemed to want to double check my level of experience and / or lack thereof for that specific skill set.
There was one whiteboard question asked. It was actually something that I was expect any college graduate / software engineer to be able to scribble down within a few minutes. The exercise was to implement a simple function and explain what the function was doing. I'm not going to provide a complete spoiler here but lets just say that the function I was asked to implement I wrote out with 9 lines of code excluding lines used for opening and closing brackets.
The interview wrapped up with just myself and Mr. Jamieson again. He provided a bit more of a description of the company and various benefits they offer. This was more along the lines of mentioning that despite being a smaller company - they did bring in lunch for employees every day. I will forever enjoy remembering the look on Mr. Jamieson's face when he detailed some of the more recent lunch meals and I told him "but I'm vegetarian" - which I am NOT and I let him in on the joke a few moments later. Also If I understood correctly they also provide 100% on health insurance and if sick then your sick days are paid - but to paraphrase - just don't try to play the system. There didn't seem to be a formal bonus structure but mention was made of various perks ( travel and similar ) provided to high performance employees.
All in all a pleasant experience and I have no regrets interviewing with Vocal Technologies but if I were make any criticisms...
In all seriousness, I was fully expecting them to sit me down in front of a system with a board I wasn't familiar with, provide me with the processor / board type and ask me to configure and cross compile u-boot or similar for the system. I even brought a variety of boards I had worked on / with in the past ( x86, PPC, ARM ) and my own JTAG in my computer bag but never got the chance to break any of them out to try and wow them.
The other is that it is a smaller company and I met with a grand total of 3 people. I really would have liked to have been given the chance to meet more of the folks I might have been working with and to see more of their operation ( as opposed to front door to conference room ). I'm going to file that away though as an oversight or under the assumption that perhaps they felt I wasn't going to be a good fit ( see above - DSP question ).
Just to wrap up, I am marking this as "no" on the offer side of things. The truth is that I did the in person interview a fairly short time ago and I have not been given either a thumbs up or down at this time.
Either way and again though - not a bad experience and from what I did see and hear it seemed like a decent place... and if you get a job with them, you're never going to bored and if you're anything like me - that's a good thing.