I was an internal recommendation for the role and knew the hiring manager.
It started with a brief interview by the internal recruiter for the role and abbreviated due to my familiarity with the hiring manager. The next step was to interview with the hiring manager, but since I had a prior relationship with the manager, a peer of his substituted. After this step, for which I received high praise, I was given a 5-problem assignment to stand up a multi-node Hadoop cluster together with a dataset and then provide responses to the problems using the HDP Ambari-based tools. They gave me 2 weeks to complete the process, though it could readily be completed over a weekend. Upon completing the exercise I developed a presentation for what they called a "readout" that was attended by 3 managers (my friend and 2 peers) as well as the hiring manager's manager (SE Director). The technical exercise itself was riddled with issues and I was provided an insufficient budget for the cluster hosting. Fortunately, the hiring manager was available and more than willing to help me through the issues. In the end however, despite demonstrating effective presentation skills and mostly acing the readout, I was rejected for technical reasons (reasons that were known early in the process and could have saved weeks of time had the hiring manager known he would be denied final decision authority).