The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at MANTECH (Washington, DC) in Dec 2019
Interview
I had received random calls from two different recruiters over the span of a week and a half. Each recruiter had asked to speak with me about the role without any notice when they’d call. I had to ask for a scheduled time. When I finally had the phone screen with the second recruiter, it was clear he didn’t know much about the role and was just reading from a script. He couldn’t answer any of my basic questions like “what are some of the projects currently being worked on” and not even “what’s the culture like”. When the screen was wrapping up, I asked when I could expect to hear back, timeframe, etc., and he said, “oh I have no idea, hopefully you hear something” and hung up. I’m totally fine if I wasn’t right for the role but having a recruiter who knew little and was ambivalent about the whole process gave me the impression the role is not considered important and therefore not worthy of pursuing.
I applied online. I interviewed at MANTECH (Herndon, VA) in Feb 2020
Interview
HR Practitioners should know better than to have peers interview their potential peers/colleagues before meeting with the hiring manager. It is't indicative of how well a team will perform together, and in fact often backfires. Peers should have no say in who is going to be brought on to essentially be competition for upward openings. And in my case, as my search on LinkedIn indicated, I had significantly more HR and govcon experience than they did. Not to mention that both of them were hired the week before I interviewed with them, so they were practically no use to me in the interview process. A good HR practitioner is going to know better than to have them interview a candidate. I tried to ask them questions about the operations and the hiring manager's management style and they couldn't answer it.
I met with the director afterwards, and the conversation went well enough - it was more conversational than interview style. We both came from similar backgrounds, and I had vast familiarity with the customers this position would be supporting.
I don't know if the hiring manager was just over-burdened and stretched too thin, but I didn't get much out of the interview, and the interview felt rushed because she came in late and mentioned "I have a hard stop at XX". So we had less than an hour of the booked hour.
After the interview, i never heard back from the recruiter - who BTW reached out to me about the opening, and was overly complimentary of my background. I found out I didn't get the position by way of email. SO lazy and unprofessional. You work in an HR function - you should know that practices such as that are detrimental to the organization. It takes 5 minutes to call and let a candidate know that they weren't selected. If you can't handle difficult conversations than perhaps this isn't the right role for you.
But it all worked out in the end - the day after I was declined, I found out my former boss (who was HORRIBLE - horrible like WOAH, and the reason I was looking for a new position) was named a new senior leader within the organization. I don't want to be associated with an organization that hires people like that.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
(from my potential peers) Tell me about the ER function at XXX (current company - Mantech competitor)