First of all, the job had been open for a very long time which was a huge red flag for me but I proceeded anyway. What can I say, I'm a fool for a neat product. Just a quick hour and a half lunch portfolio review. My interview was from 12:00-1:30pm. Upon arrival I was greeted at the door by a very smug and rude individual. I was asked if I wanted some water and I said yes, which was apparently the wrong answer. A catered lunch arrived as my interview started and I wasn't offered anything to eat. It was really disappointing considering I didn't have time to grab lunch before heading back to my regular job. Offering something to eat during a lunch interview is just common courtesy. Anyhow, I met with three individuals; a front-end engineer who was cool, a contract designer who didn't seem to know what the hell was going on, and a self-important product manager who couldn't have been more eager to tell me that he worked at Twitter. I've done a lot of hiring over the years and applicants from Twitter typically go to the bottom of the heap. Benchling got really lucky with their first designer, who is now gone which is unfortunate because the product itself is pretty neat. I wouldn't have too much faith in the company going forward as they're very inexperienced and there were red flags left and right. I can tell you that experience at a big company or a PhD does not translate to startup success. In my experience it's quite the opposite.

I feel a lot better after reading about everybody else's terrible experiences with their interview process knowing that it wasn't my fault things went poorly. I too had a very long and drawn out experience that resulted in NO results. The process consisted of a phone interview, followed by a whole day presenting my portfolio and presenting on improvements I thought could be made on their site The presentation itself took me about 7 hours over 2 days to complete. I took 2 half days from work to get it done, and an entire vacation day for the in-person. Around 6 people were at the meeting. They did seem interested and were very polite with their questions, listening to my suggestions and critiques. Some seemed interested and some seemed bored. I was wondering why those ppl even bothered showing up. I received a curt email 4 weeks later that they decided to go in another direction, despite having followed up once each week after the interview. After wasting vacation time on work and spending hours on their assignment, they could have had the common courtesy to tell me earlier. I have 7 years of design experience from notable and established companies and frankly felt like they are in desperate need for someone to clean up their site. I was really surprised with the way I was rejected. I agree with the other person that they were probably trying to squeeze free work out of me and it really left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. REALLY consider if you are ready to spend hours of work for this company with the high chance of getting nothing in return. It’s probably better I didn’t get the job. If this is how they treat people who are doing valuable work for them for FREE, I can’t imagine how poorly they treat people they are paying.