1. written application: typical
2. group interview: this is the stage that i had issues with. the interview questions were typical, but the interviewer's arbitrariness made the interview more difficult than expected. we were interviewed by an undergraduate student who was a former fellow but did not seem to have received interview training. they were unenthused, impacting the mood of all interviewees and fostering a competitive and uncollaborative environment (when the company is intentional about creating a collaborative culture), blindly followed an interview script, and could have been more professional and more open to clarifying expectations and hearing answers that didn't align with their script. if we didn't give answers that they approved of, we were docked for them.
some of the questions we were asked made sense, but other questions did not. for example, we were asked to evaluate and rank a work sample without being given a set of standards to evaluate it by. when the interviewer was asked for greater clarity on the ranking standards, we were talked down on and told "this is the type of work you're expected to do" without clearly outlining what the work was in the first place.
if it's a group interview of 3 people, i'd expect more time dedicated to group collaborative activities and more time overall, ideally at least 1 hour to get a true sense of interviewees' strengths and personalities. the interview was 45 minutes and the last 10 minutes were spent answering interviewees' questions. if the HR team will make decisions based off 1 interview stage, extend the length of the interview, or switch to 20 minute 1:1 interviews. for the fairest review to counter individual interviewers' biases, i recommend 2 stages.
otherwise, great communicative HR team and growing company.
