The design exercise is more like a design project. while they keep telling you not to spend more than 8 hours on it, they evaluate it like you should have spent 40 hours on it. While I sat through the 3rd interview all I could think about was them saying the week before "don't spend too much time on this because we will know if it looks like you spent more than 8 hours". They end the second interview with you leading a brainstorming session about the design exercise, which is a ping pong "hookup" app for internal office team ("think Grindr for office ping pong play" - that's how it was put in context to me. wow now that's appropriate content for an interview....) I was a definite finalist, and as usual it probably came down to splitting hairs at the end to decide on the candidate, but their process was not what I expected. I can understand pivotal meeting me and using the time to discuss the hand off of the style guide to the new in house designer and exit strategy details but this was like no other process I have ever experienced in 15 years of designing user experiences. Had I known Pivotal would be conducting all the interviewing I would not have perused this role. I wanted to work for Euclid, not Pivotal. The process of Pivotal running the entire interview process makes you feel detached from the actual team you will be working with allowing a third party that will be completely removed from any consequences of their decision not to mention its in their best interest to keep the process going as long as they can. Also, any issues that come up after a designer is hired, Pivotal will be called in once again to "fix" or assist in getting things "back on track". This was just too full of conflicts of interest for it to be objective let alone fair. I had a fair amount of respect for Pivotal Labs prior to this experience but after seeing the quality of some of their consultants I would look to another consulting firm if I needed outside UX consulting. Their questions sometimes lacked logic and completely contradicted the parameters they had set forth for the exercise a mere 4 days earlier. One examples what during Int#2 after i had brainstormed about the process of the app and how i would go about it, they then said ok, don't complicate this, keep this simple, your on the right track. Then during Int#3, they start critiquing it because it does not have enough features and too simple!?!? Or "seems like you could have added some more ways of communication to potential ping pong players...." I was like uhhh well ...sure i could have but just last week you said not to do that". I think a decision had been made before I even went into interview 3. They critique was so scattered and subjective.the ultimate contradiction "Do that. Don't do that". My solution was solid and provided much more non-intrusive communication between ping pong players at work. Never mind the fact that your at work, should you really be playing ping pong? It seemed like whatever i did I wasn't going to win the "Pivots" over and that's sad because the actual team I would be working with I liked a lot and had very good connections and face time whit them as limited as that was during this process.