They are making me nostalgic. It reminds me of when I did OCI when I graduated from engineering graduate school. The process sounds similar. There is an interview on campus, then an interview at the company.
The actual interview itself doesn't sound similar, though. For one thing, HR departments collectively decided somewhere along the line that an engineer who could do tricky puzzles on a whiteboard would make a good engineer. I always found that a funny assumption, even funnier when you get the same puzzle for three different interviews.
I remember at the last one I said to the interviewer, "Look, I've solved this two times already, and you're not going to get anything out of this, so can we just skip it?"
He laughed, we skipped it, and I got a job offer out of that interview.
In the end, however, I didn't take any of the offers I received from OCI. My sister's housemate's ex-boyfriend had founded a company and was looking for somebody with my background. We chatted on the phone, which led to an interview. We hit it off well, and that's where I went. It was one of the best decisions I've ever made.
I sometimes wonder if the extremely structured nature of the OCI process leads to frustrated employers and employees later on. The best employer-employee situation is one in which the employer wants that specific employee, and that employee really wants to be working for that employer. The problem with OCI is that this sort of pre-hire relationship is difficult to establish because so many people are shuttled in and out so quickly.
That having been said, I appreciate that I was lucky. OCI is a great mechanism, especially in these tough times, for getting hiring employers in touch with students who might not otherwise find a job. Not everybody has a sister's roommate's ex-boyfriend connection.
For those of you going through the process, good luck.
1 comment:
ah, OCI. yeah, i did a bunch of that but, like you, ended up taking the job where an online friend of a real-life friend worked. the problem with tough times is that companies massively scale back their on-campus presence, and even when they do show up to job fairs, it can be depressing for students when they realize that said company isn't really all that serious about hiring.
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