Pew Charitable Trusts Pew Leadership Year Fellow Interview

Interview Details – Initial contact with HR was great; very friendly, helpful and forthcoming. Initial phone interview (more like a "screening", really) with HR was brief (5-10 minutes) and focused on confirming resume/background. Followed up by two long-distance Skype interviews for 2 different positions. Scheduling these interviews was difficult. An assistant claimed to not be receiving all of my emails--just some, although none of them were bounced back to me. After scheduling, being canceled on and rescheduling, the interviews, they eventually happened via Skype with a panel of 2-3 people. These interviews lasted about 45 minutes to an hour and the panels were friendly but definitely formal with typical interview questions about strengths/weaknesses, leadership style, experiences, etc. After the interviews, for one position, I was notified by HR within a week of the interview that I did not receive an offer. For the other position, the notification dragged on for weeks. I had to email/call both HR and one of the interviewers several times after two weeks had gone by to get any information. For over a month I kept getting the line "we're still deciding and you should know by next week." Then after a month, I stopped receiving responses to my emails/phone messages. After eventually accepting another position elsewhere, I gave up trying to contact them to find out about the status of this position. So on the one hand, my interview process for one position was great (despite the fact that I did not receive an offer), but for the other it was very frustrating and unprofessional of them to have never notified me either way after a second interview. I'm assuming it was just an oversight and not the normal way HR is handled at Pew, but it still couldn't help coloring my assessment of their organization.