Generally, I like to have one of my HR generalists or myself do a phone interview before I take anyone's time to fly them here and put them through a whole day of interviews. And so who they are is a critical component to success at Ciena. Although human resources people can't really probe for technical skills in-depth, we certainly are good at understanding the culture match. We will reject a candidate who on paper might look like a perfect fit if we feel that they will not be a good contributing member of the team. There aren't any silos or walls.
People are very comfortable directly contacting a peer who works in another area.
You don't have to go up any chain of command. There aren't any rules in terms of upward mobility. We also look for how you describe where you came from and the kind of work you did. That's another flag for me, because we are very team-oriented. Turnover has been fairly stable.