I heard about the job through their career website, which I've been checking for quite some time. I have a substantial family history at Lockheed, and have been applying for jobs for well over a year without any feedback whatsoever. According to a manager at Lockheed, they essentially throw away all applications with employee referrals to avoid any appearance of favoritism in hiring. This, the manager said, was why I had never been contacted previously - everything was submitted as a referral. I applied for this position at first with an employee referral, but was quickly told to remove any mention of that if I wanted the job. After pulling the referral information out, I was contacted very quickly for an interview.
Because the position is in Denver, and my current job is in North Carolina, the logistics of the interview were difficult. I had burned all my vacation time for the year already, and I couldn't get away, so we did a detailed phone interview instead. I spoke with the tech lead on the project I'd be working with as well as the senior project manager, and the interview was pleasant and fairly easy. A couple of days after the interview I was told informally that I was going to get an offer, and that it was all over but the paperwork.
H.R.'s handling of the process after the interview sucked. They lost my application at first, and asked me to reapply. I did so, and they said I should hear something in a week. After two weeks, I called them up, and my application had been sitting in someone's to-do box without getting processed, so they told me they would get right on it. I called them back a week later, and was told my application was in "compensation" and I'd hear back any day. Compensation needed information that wasn't on the application (the specific dates of my graduation from college and grad school), so that took another week. All in all, it took over a month for H.R. to handle the paperwork after I was told about the recommendation to hire. That was the hard part - the interview was easy.
