The interview process took a total of about 3 weeks. A recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn about a role and then set up an initial call. Next, I had an interview with the team's Design Manager. The final onsite was virtual due to COVID-19, but consisted of a 1-hour portfolio presentation with the whole team and then four 2 on 1 interviews and a 1 on 1 with the Design Manager. These video calls were split up over two consecutive days (Thursday and Friday). I thought the interviews went really well! On Monday morning, the recruiter emailed me to ask if I had time to chat. She then waited to call me until 6:30pm (she was 30 minutes late) to tell me that the team decided to go with someone internal because it would be faster to get them up to speed. I was very sad and frustrated at this point because A) the recruiter waited all day to give me bad news, B) she was late to that call where I was sitting staring at my phone waiting, and C) they ended up giving the job to someone who already had a job AND already worked at Apple. As someone who was impacted by the pandemic and lost my job in May, I was disappointed by this. Why bother interviewing external people if you are just going to hire someone from another internal team? I love Apple as a company and talked to a lot of really smart and interesting people, but this definitely hampered my opinion of them a bit.

The interview process consisted of an initial recruiter screen followed by a hiring manager conversation and multiple team interviews. The process was fairly structured and straightforward, with each stage building on the previous one. The final round included several back-to-back sessions that covered portfolio deep dives, design thinking, and collaboration. Everyone I spoke with was professional, thoughtful, and asked in-depth questions that pushed on both craft and problem-solving.