After applying in a variety of formats, I was contacted to set up an interview. I think applying in multiple ways increased my chances, but I'm not sure which one actually led to the interview. There seems to be a really big effort on recruiting, but I'm not sure how coordinated it is across the contacts I dealt with.
The interview was an all day event with multiple other candidates. Most of the other candidates were young college seniors with the exception of a lady who already worked at Highmark in another position. Most of the represented staff were employees who had been at Highmark for over a decade, and represented senior positions across the IT departments. There were also some recent hires who were already in the program we were applying for as well.
The position I was interviewing for was a rotational program sponsored by the CIO where employees would be spending 6 months each in 4 assigned departments followed by a planned promotion to management within one of those departments. Examples of the departments were Windows server support, Linux server support, networking, application analysis, and application development.
After a somewhat awkward opening networking session, there were introductory speeches regarding the program and a tour of the facilities. I was then assigned to interview with managers from the hardware departments. I had two relatively thorough interviews, and I felt that the managers liked hearing my stories about projects I worked on in school and internships that were relevant to the questions they were asking.
We had lunch as a group with a recent hire representative from the program who told us a lot about what it would be like. The day concluded with a final group session where we got to ask questions about the company and program. I made sure to have it be clarified there what the hiring criteria was since they had a stringent policy on completing college with a 3.5 GPA. I had a 4.0 major GPA, but a lower than 3.5 cumulative GPA. I had included this in my application, but I wanted to verify that wouldn't be a problem and was told that I was correct.
I tried to follow up with the people I met there afterwards, but didn't hear much back. I finally got a call from a recruiter a while later who said I was offered a position with a starting salary of $55K and asked if I wanted to accept. I said I was interested, but wanted to find out more information about if my GPA was going to be an issue or not since I had read a lot of information on documentation I received that indicated it was a hard rule for cumulative GPA. I had been warned that an insufficient GPA would result in the offer being rescinded later on, and didn't want to risk it over other job offers if that was a possibility. The recruiter said she would check on this and get back to me. I ended up missing her call when she called back since I was working. I tried calling back every day for weeks after that, and I unfortunately was not able to pick up the one or two other times she tried to call me back. I accepted another position in the meanwhile and forgot about it. A month or so later, I got a letter stating that the job offer had been rescinded since I had not replied.