I was first brought on as a temp. When I submitted my resume, it only took about two weeks for them to call me. I was living in another city and they scheduled a phone interview for the next day and said it would be about 30 minutes to an hour long. During the interview I realized that it was a behavioral interview (which seems to be all the rage these days) and I was not prepared for that kind of interview which may have been a good thing because I was completely honest with all of my answers. I came away from the interview feeling like I had completely bombed it and his tone of voice and curtness left me with a less than hopeful expectation of success. Almost exactly 24 hours later, the interviewer called me and said that he wanted to offer me a temp position (Telephone Qualification, or TQ) which was only guaranteed to last for two months. I was told that this two months would also act as a sort of "ongoing interview" which would help them decide whether or not they wanted to hire me on full-time.
After having worked there for nine weeks, I had become the de facto team lead of the TQ team by coaching teammates, sharing quality advice/strategy, outlasting 8 other temps that were let go in brutal fashion, and assisting our manager during meetings just out of habit. I also hit the metrics they expected me to achieve, only passed along quality leads, and educated myself on product knowledge in my spare time.
Once the two months was nearing an end (which just so happened to be the end of Q1) I had been told by my manager that while I was a hard worker, was very intelligent, impressive, a natural leader, and that my technical knowledge made me dangerous in a good way, I was twice denied a position on his team because he felt that I was too verbose, was not cocky or arrogant enough, I was not a natural salesperson and that because of this it was going to be much harder for me to get it full-time position even though everyone had great things to say about me 99% of the time, and that I needed to be more succinct.
Apparently this May have been a motivational tactic and it worked. I started reaching out to other managers asking for a few minutes of their time to discuss open positions and why they should give me one. The four other people that interviewed me for their teams they all were impressed with me and they all wanted me on their team, but only one of them had the spot available to offer me a position. All of the interviews were fairly informal, one on one, and basically their way of trying to gauge whether or not I would be worth the risk or investment and whether or not I would be able to contribute to their team success. I feel like everyone I talked to had been honest straightforward, caring, and were overall intelligent people.