A long and fruitless process that began to lose steam halfway through. The problem with Toptal is it is a meta context for the job market. As it claims to have a very elite “platform” for finding work, it is in constant competition with the real-world marketplace which moves far more quickly. After meeting with three representatives over a matter of several weeks, I was left to prioritize other offers for higher quality opportunities and lost interest in their convoluted onboarding process. This process involved presentations and mock projects, as well as primitive, email-based communication requiring compressed PDFs going back and forth through assessors with different and contradictory criteria. Felt like I was working with the bottom 3% rather than the top.