First I had a recruiter call me. About 2 weeks later, I had a phone interview with the hiring manager which was in great depth. About 2 weeks later, I had an on-site interview. During the on-site meetings, I was interviewed by teams of people over a full afternoon, since it was a lead position. Everyone was very pleasant. I was asked to critique the security for an internet-of-things type of architecture shown in a diagram. One unusual thing about the interview afternoon was a question that I heard over and over again from different interviewers: "How do you work with difficult people?" I gather that there is much self-awareness that the typical person working in the group is difficult to work with....either because that person may be brilliant but has no social skills, or because that person thinks s/he is always right and doesn't like being challenged. Certainly the interviewers seemed very smart, and mentioned that they liked working with their brilliant colleagues.
I had told the hiring manager that I already had another offer and needed timely feedback. I did hear back in about a week that they didn't want to hold me up from some other offer (my assumption that they weren't extremely interested to hire me). The feedback from HR mentioned that I had passed the technical side of the interview, but that I might not be the right fit for the leadership side and they were continuing to interview other candidates. On the leadership side, I have to assume that they were looking for some particular approach to handling those difficult people, but I couldn't guess what they were looking for.
