I've been in the running for a Sr. Systems Admin position with a particular company for about 6 weeks now. I have never seen such effort in making sure the right guy gets hired. Here's the sequence of events that got me to where I find myself today:
Got an email from the recruiter about a direct hire position asking if I was interested, I replied back that I would be interested in talking to him.
Two weeks later he contacts me and gets some basic information from me, he tells me the company had 4 or 5 applicants and wanted 4 more and he already had 3 more and then I was next. So I guess I was his 8th choice
A few days later the company's HR manager decides to take a chance on a phone interview with me. 30 minute people skills/problem solving/customer service kind of interview.
The following week I have an interview with the IT manager, he tells me it's a direct hire position and we talk for about 1 hour about my experience and what I'm looking for in a job, then he takes me for a tour of his faclilty and says he's sure I'd be invited back.
The following week the recruiter asked for references. Later in the week I interview with the IT Director and the Director of Credit for about 1 1/2 hours, to get a feel for how I would fit in with the company and the IT staff. The IT director asks ME if I knew whether the position was "temp to perm" or direct hire (as though he wasn't sure which it was supposed to be), that they usually only do temp to perm. The interviews go very well by the way.
The next week (last week) the recruiter assures me the position is direct hire. I go back for yet another interview with the Application Development director, more touchy feely I need a warm and fuzzy about this guy kind of interview. The next morning the recruiter urgently needs some additional peer references.
This past Saturday the recruiter calls me at home and tells me the company the job is a contract to hire instead of a direct placement, but they were ready to start talking about an offer. I offer up strong reservations about the contract thing, being the only income in my household for the forseeable future with sick children I have to have a stable job with health insurance. He went back to the company and arranged for them to pay all of my COBRA costs while I was under contract with them, which is pretty good actually, but I still showed apprehension about the contract situation.
Finally, this afternoon he calls me back and suddenly (and I thought, suspiciously) the hr person says they are not as reluctant to hire me as they were and are again considering hiring me directly, and they want me to come back for another interview and talk to the VP of Finance and the VP of HR. Another case of trying to give everyone a warm and fuzzy, I was told there was a perception problem with the way they hire IT staff and the contract to hire in addition to the gestapo style interviewing was how they were dealing with it.
Have any of you had an interview process drag out this long and this rigorus? If this didn't seem like a great job (lots of paid training, leading edge technology, growing company with growing IT infrastrucrture, plenty of IT budget, etc.) I would have said "forget it" weeks ago.
