Hey Everyone, did the interview approx 3 weeks ago.. thought I'd share my thoughts.
Getting to Doha was fantastic.. Everything runs very smoothly and you are well taken care of. They seem a bit overwhelmed with getting you everything in time for your departure as far as tickets/ visas etc but mine came about two days before my departure.
The time change from anyone in North America is pretty crazy. I basically got two hours of sleep before the interview just from being on the back side of the clock.
The presentation is very well thought out and informative, the head of recruitment is extremely knowledgable and easy to talk to/ listen to. The presentation takes about 30 mins and the rest of the recruitment guys go over documentation with a fine tooth comb, noting questions and irregularities for later.
The 50 question exam isn't rocket science but definetly takes some prep.. they seem to ask questions from all over. For anyone not used to mb instead of inches of merc there are a few general rules of thumb you probably want to remember.. see below.
After the test (we all passed but they don't show you the marks) you are given an interview time and location. Everything is in the hotel you are staying which makes it easy to eat, rest, etc while you wait. I found the scheduling of interviews pretty disorganized- they changed times for people, ran hours late on the latter ones to be interviewed etc. There is some info on this forum about Carl, one of the panel guys.. He definetly is just playing "bad cop" and I'm sure is there mostly to see your reaction to his questions. You can expect definate gruff responises, eye rolling, telling you your answer makes no sense at least once etc. The rest of the guys are all very cordial and take different turns asking different questions, usually randomly and from a list they seem to have.
Sim Eval- Definetly the least impressive part of the interview. First of all they have a predetermined pick up time for everyone even though there can be up to 12 candidates a class. It works out to almost an hour per person when you include sim change over, briefings etc, and you all wait in the sim building for your turn. (keep in mind the interview starts at 8 am, our sim pick up was around 6pm, with sims going until after midnight). Again they seemed very disorganized, our instructor was late and we were all rushed through. The instructor seemed stressed trying to fit us all through and it got worse for the people that went later on in the night. Fatigue was definetly an issue, and the instructor is trying to act as sim operator, pnf, atc and instructor since most of us hadn't flown an A330 before. I honestly found his english difficult to understand, CRM horrible, instructing technique even worse and he had virtually no patience. But hey.. maybe he was just having a bad day.
Hope all this helps.. good luck everyone!