Began with an HR screening, followed by a prep call. That part of the process was well organized and friendly. Following the prep call I was scheduled with 4 back-to-back interviews across a 2-hour window where I met with all stakeholders, plus an additional interview the following week. It felt like a hire-by-committee process, which I think is unusual particularly for a large company like Twitter. Some of those interviews were friendly and casual, others were intense and prying. Overall it was a lot of time spent talking and repeating myself to many people, some of whom would have just been peers on the team, not hiring managers nor senior leaders.

I did a phone interview which was pretty challenging and engaging. I was then asked to complete a challenging and very vague assignment: -Formulate an idea for a Twitter concept/program that will help the brand achieve their marketing objectives. This can be any Fortune 100 brand, for any initiative/product/audience/timing/etc. I read the project description several times over, asked several follow up questions to clarify the objective and completed the assignment to the T - which was a 12 slide PowerPoint deck that took me several hours to complete. After a sent it over, within a few hours I received an email that said that I did not follow the instructions and that I did not make the next round. In my opinion, given how vague the assignment was, this wasn't exactly a fair assessment, so I reached out. The interviewer called me to hear me out, and explained that (paraphrasing here) Twitter expects candidates to act like they work there already and do their brainstorming work for free during the interview process, and that I should have understood how a Twitterer would have interpreted the assignment. Twitter also reserves the right to use your creative ideas if they feel they would be a fit for them to use. The next step in the hiring process would have been to present the project, but their decision was made. I was ok with not being considered for the role, but I do think their hiring process could have been handled differently and more fairly - It didn't seem ethical to make interviewees spend hours putting together a full deck that the company can take advantage of. It felt like I just spent hours on a "trick question". I left with an icky feeling that I had just been used as part of the "free work mill" that tech companies use to make interview candidates do these extensive, hours long projects for free. Just an icky way to end the experience.