They asked me to do a design exercise based on their current product in their initial contact with me. As it's an existing product of theirs, it's like asking people to do free design work for them, which is not cool anyway. Plus, it was before any conversation, not even an recruiter screening. IMO, it's very unprofessional, with no respect to candidates' work. Also, I think the design exercise itself is not well designed, lacking some basic info to work on the challenge. And because it was passed on by the recruiter, not anyone from the design team, it was hard to communicate and clarify.

The process is similar to how others described: UX test, phone interview, on-site interview. The people are friendly enough, the recruiter is friendly, but I'm surprised at the extreme level of positive responses to her on Glassdoor (in my opinion, she was just doing her job, not necessarily better or worse than other recruiters I've worked with). The on-site was actually pretty off-putting. The interviewers are either distracted or just difficult to communicate with. I think a lot of preference is placed on internal referrals, which is typical and expected I suppose. After all of this, I was told I don't have enough experience, which you'd think you'd be able to straight from my resume/phone screening. The experience was okay, no more no less. But unfortunately, at the end of the day, it felt like a waste of time rather than a great experience.