Stryker Operations Manager Interview

Interview Details – The interview process for Stryker was insane and is well known within the industry as being very difficult to pass. It started at the job fair during my initial contact with the recruiter sent to the event. After a review of my resume and a fairly long general conversation on the floor of the event, they conducted a private individual oral interview of about 30 minutes utilizing a predesignated set of questions which covered a variety of topics. There were specific responses they were looking for unbeknownst to me at the time. I was contacted a few days later by a member of the Stryker HR department who told be I did very well on the oral interview and that if I would like to proceed, they wanted me to conduct a phone interview with a professional interviewer from the Gallup organization. I completed this interview a few days later. The interviewer informed me that she would be reading very specific questions which she could neither expand upon or clarify, and that all my responses would be recorded for evaluation by a specifically trained colleague. The interview went on for about 45 minutes and the questions were not related to any specific job or technical issue.
I was contacted about a week later by Stryker HR and was told I did well on the phone interview and they would like for me to come on site for a round of face to face interviews. I flew to Kalamazoo and spent a day interviewing with five people. I talked with directors and/or managers from HR, engineering, operations, and quality. Each manager had a copy of my resume and what I later found out was data from my phone interview. The Gallup organization has developed a method of scoring people on how they will be a fit within the organization not based on technical competence but on basic team and skills and work ethic.

Negotiation Details – Because I was employed in another state it was all accomplished via the telephone. It wasn't out of the ordinary with some give and take on both sides. I was a little naive since it was my first job out of the military and I found I probably could have done a better job had I done some more research on salary levels for the position they were looking to fill, but overall I was satisfied at the time.