I was interviewed by a total of seven different people, three by phone and the rest by video conference. Overall, everyone with whom I spoke was unfailingly friendly, but almost from the start I was hearing mixed messages: - Phone interviewers all told me they had 'red flags' or 'concerns' about my candidacy for reasons they couldn't (or wouldn't) verbalize to me. I found it deflating to hear those things from people who had not even met me in person and was perplexed why they would continue scheduling additional interviews if that was the case. - I was asked some disturbing questions such as how I felt about being told to download 1,000 documents from the cloud to the Company's servers. Or, how I felt about formatting powerpoint presentations. Those questions were incongruous with the job description and its seniority. The questions insinuated secretarial/administrative duties for what should have been a senior personal-contributor level position with multiple years of experience and an MBA. - The position required relocation to Silicon Valley, which I was more than happy to do; but interviewers kept requesting reassurances that this was indeed the case. Either they didn't believe me or they wanted me to relocate on my own dime and just didn't want to say that out loud. - After three phone interviews, instead of bringing me in for in-person interviews; they organized a 3.5 hour video-conference interview with five different people. They said that if the long-distance interviews were successful, they would put an offer on the table and only then bring me in. That made no sense to me - why would any company put an offer on the table for a candidate they'd never shook hands with? For a large corporation like Agilent to be miserly about the $500 price tag it would have cost them to bring me in for in-person interviews raised a red flag (especially when combine with the relocation issue). And after all that, they didn't even have the decency to call me in person to tell me they preferred not to proceed with my candidacy. Instead, I received a laconic cookie-cutter email from a Company-authorized recruiter (not even from the hiring manager. An overall perplexing interview process. Nice people but with a lot of conflicting sub-context from their actions and between the lines.

The recruiter sent me a file with about a dozen questions about my skills and qualifications, basically the same thing as a phone screen but submitted in a written form. Then I had a 1/2 call with the hiring manager who was very nice and answered all my questions. They said the next step is to come for an in-person interview on campus but I never heard back from them.