Interview Review for 10 year GC

andymac · July 27, 2010

Hi all.

To follow on from my previous posting, here is my interview experience at Phoenix.

Firstly it's a little difficult to find, this is important. Find Starbucks at the same address, which is just 200 yards from the interview office. It's just a single glass door, with a small sign above. Get to Starbucks and walk in a westward direction along the building front. It's there.

You take a lift, ooops elevator to level 2, and as you walk out the lift, security is right there, who will do the normal scanning and booking in. And then it's straight into a smallish waiting area of about 25 seats. You put the interview notice through a slot in the wall. It's not first come first served, I think it's about the officer assigned to your case and when that officer becomes free.

Our appointment was at 10.30 and that's the exact time we were called in. ( Other appointments were running late ).

Ok, at this point let's me tell you what paperwork and material we took, rather than type all this, let me say everything ! There has already been a lot of postings on VJ about what to take, so I won't take type space by listing it all. ........ Like I said already ...... EVERYTHING!!

Anyway, so a lady calls us, we go to her office, not a typical interview room, but actually her office. She swears us in and tells us we are being recorded on both video and audio.

We sit down and the questions begin, very easy at first. She has all our paperwork in front of us and is simply clarifying things .... Name, DOB, phone number etc. These questions are directed to us both. All done nice and easy.

The questioning then steps up a gear, still mainly based upon all the paperwork she has in front of her, but a delivered with a bit more vigor on her part. Asked my wife questions about the names of my family members.

With that done she moved on to a final phase of questions, that did not relate to any of the paperwork she had. Where did you meet? She spent some time on this, asking us to detail a little bit more than a place and time. And the I guess we got a little trip wire question which was why did we take so long to AOS, I mumbled something for about 5 minutes, and that was ok. She then asked my wife a few questions about her job. She wanted a lot of detail about that. But my wife delivered her talking very well.

The interviewer, then asked to see some evidence of our 3 years together. But did not ask to see anything specific, I just started grabbing things in our folders. Like bills, insurance, bank statements. As the interviewer was having a good look at the paperwork, I did not put too much on the desk, as I did not know how much she would actually need. She asked if she could take some of the paperwork for her records, which I replied yes too.

Next, she said she liked photo's, so we showed her our wedding and some other suff. The interview spent sometime looking at these. Finally she said, everything is in order and you have been approved.

She took my departure card and gave me a letter saying "recommended for approval"

And that was it, we say goodbye and thank you, it lasted about 30 minutes, which I think it longer than I read on other posts. But she was being very thorough, but NOT actively trying to find a problem to deny. Just being thorough.

So that's us done !

Hope this helps, and my wife and I truly pray that everybody is able to get this pushed through when their interviews arrive.

All the best to all VJers everywhere.