A third party recruiter contacted me to interview for what they had indicated to me would be an Associate Director position. After a phone interview with them (which was a generic run down of the job and my resume); I was connected for a phone interview with Protiviti's HR recruiter. She also went through my resume and asked some behavioral-based questions. Neither of these interviews were difficult. The Protiviti recruiter was very nice and easy to talk to. Be sure to ask the recruiter a lot of questions about the firm and your responses should indicate that you've done your home work. The timeframe of these activities was about two weeks. The next round consisted of a phone interview with the Managing Director. This interview seemed to be relaxed and more of a personality/behavior-based interview as well. No technical questions were asked. The following week, I had a phone interview with a Director at the Dallas office. I found out through him that the classification of the position wasn't firm and that it was likely to be hired as a Senior Manager position. Without flinching or getting upset, I kept my cool and successfully finished the interview. The Managing Director called me back later that day to ask me to present a 30-60-90 day plan of what I would do if hired and asked me to call him in a week for a phone presentation. I presented it the following week and made it through successfully. The Managing Director said he enjoyed my presentation and then asked if I would be willing to have a lunch interview. The next week, we had lunch and had a more technical conversation and discussion of job expectations. At the end of the interview, he asks me about salary. I told him that I would need some time to think about it and that I would email him my response. I responded that I would expect to be paid competitively and equitably with the market, my education and experience factored in. I was fairly confident that I would receive an offer since he brought up salary. I guess I was too presumptuous. Weeks passed without a response only to find that he wanted a candidate with less industry and more selling experience. Luckily, I had other offers coming in by then. In a nutshell, while I enjoyed every conversation and interview that I had with the folks at Protiviti; I found the interview process to be very unneccessarily drawn out. They didn't seem to know exactly what level of person they were looking for. While a high level of ambiguity is appropriate in certain situations, it really isn't for the prospective candidate that wants to know what they're potentially getting into. Interview with caution.