I had applied through an online career portal for the position of 'Technology Engineer'. Received a phone call from the HR personnel two weeks later requesting me to come for an interview. When I picked up the call, the HR personnel started screaming down the phone as to why I had not replied to her email messages informing me that I have been shortlisted. It was later realized that, although I had given a correct university email address, the HR personnel had intentionally added an additional dot (i.e., . ) in the email address, since this was the address format followed by a neighboring university.
At my first interview, I was interviewed by two division managers. I was told that, although I had applied for the ‘Technology Engineer’ position, I am going to be interviewed for the position of ‘Firmware Developer'. The ‘Technology Engineer’ position does not exist and was merely to attract applicants. During the interview, no technical questions were asked verbally. After about 2 hours of random chit chat, I was asked to answer a written test on programming. The test consists of C++ programming questions and I will have to write sample codes to solve given problems. The main focus of the test was on multithreading; it carried the most marks. You are given 100 minutes to complete the test and also told explicitly that it is okay if you cannot answer all questions within 100 minutes. This programming test is difficult and you need to be an excellent programmer to pass.
In a second interview later, I was interviewed for the position of ‘Application Engineer’. They had asked me to prepare a presentation on a radio frequency (RF) related topic. I spent 2.5 days, with only 6 hours of sleep, preparing for the presentation. During my presentation, the hiring manager did not even pay attention. She also walked out of the room mid-interview. Again they had asked me to sit for another written test on RF related questions. The hiring manager never informed me whether I was selected or not for the 'Application Engineer' position after the interview.
I will conclude as follows. (1) the HR personnel are not very good and having them select your resume to be interviewed by the managers depends greatly on luck. (2) Once getting through the short listing stage by the HR personnel, you will see the managers in face to face interviews and possibly for a different position than what you had applied for. (3) The managers solely base their hiring decision on three criteria: (i) whether you do well in their written test, which is different for different positions, (ii) whether your degree certificate/academic qualification explicitly has the words of ‘RF’ or other related words such as ‘electromagnetic’ in them, and (iii) prior work experience in the exactly same area as to which you are applying.