It started with emails for about 2 weeks, answering questions and waiting for a response. After this, I got to move on to the phone interview. There were 3 in total that spanned 2 weeks. The 1st lasted around 1-1/2 hrs. The 2nd was a marathon interview where I would talk to someone for about 15 or 20 minutes and then they would hand the phone to someone else and it would repeat. I talked to about a dozen or so people for 4 hours. The 3rd interview was much shorter. They asked if I was still interested and schedules a on sight interview.
Finally I got to the in person interview phase, scheduled about 2 weeks after the last phone interview. My interview was scheduled to start at 7am. In the morning I had 1 on 1 interviews one after another. Most of the people were very arrogant & rude. They would ask irrelevant questions that I have never been asked before during an interview. Every time I asked a question about what my job duties and expectations would be, what the team was like, what the company culture was like... the interviewers would become evasive and change the subject. They would often cut me off when I tried to talk. (On a side note in the 3 years I worked at Cree, no one was ever able to tell me what my job responsibilities were. All I know is that it was not close to what the job posting said.) There were no breaks between the 1 on 1 interviewers. 5 hrs later at 12:00pm, they gave me 30 minutes for lunch at the company cafeteria where I was allowed the basic meal. During the lunch, 4 interviewers sat with me and kept on firing questions one after another for the full 30 minutes while I was trying to eat. Then they hurried me back to the interviewing room promptly at 12:30pm. I had barely eaten any of my food because of all of the questions they kept asking me. Then in the afternoon I had a group vs me interview. There were 10 people sitting around the table. (Most of them did not work in the department I was interviewing for, some of them did not even work in the same building.) For the entire afternoon they bombarded me with questions and their overly arrogant attitudes. They asked me a lot of questions that took me by surprise and they had no business asking or knowing. Some of the questions that asked were:
Do you have any siblings?
Are you close with your family and friends?
How much time a week do you spend with friends or family?
Are you single?
Do you have any kids?
Would you be willing to sign a contract to guarantee us five years of service as a Process Technician?
Around 6:30pm when I was completely brain fried, starved, & thirsty, I got to go home. I left thinking that I had dodged a bullet and thought about the other job leads that I needed to follow up.
When I called them back to inquire about the status the next week, they told me that I was still being considered and that they were still discussing which applicant would be the best fit. This continued on for about a month. Every time I called, I got stone walled and told that they were still "processing" the different applicant's interviews. Then one day after I had moved on, I received a phone call telling me that I was the applicant that they had chosen. I asked if I needed to come in for a 2nd in person interview, since that seemed to be common practice from my past experience. They said no. I was then told what compensation they were offering. When I tried to negotiate, like I had been taught from my college career. The person on the other side of the phone said "No". I was then told that I could not negotiate. I had to take or leave their offer. I was about 2 weeks away from being homeless and my other leads had dried up so I took the offer.
Overall this entire process took about 2-1/2 months. It was nearly impossible to get any communication from them. The interviewers were both rude and arrogant. After I started to work at Cree, I found out that I was significantly underpaid compared to other entry level Technicians, even though I had a Bachelor's in Computer Engineering and most of them had no college education. In addition, almost everything that they had told me about Cree and the position in order to entice me to work for them turned out to be a lie. My work schedule was nothing like what they said, I worked almost 75% of all holidays, I never got the vacation days that I asked for, they would not let me develop new skill sets in order to move up in the company, and for everything that they said about why they needed a Computer Engineer, there was nothing that required any knowledge in that field in the position. On the day that I left Cree, 3 years after I started, I still had no idea what the position's actual job responsibilities were and I still had yet to receive the starter tool kit. Apparently it was on order for the entire time.
My advice would be this, unless you are interviewing for an R&D Scientist position... Run! Run as fast as you can to any other job opportunity you can find.
