The overall take away here was that a lot of time was spent to get rejected at a very early stage in the process. I won't second guess Percolate's actual decision but they should have been able to reach such a decision--an early stage rejection--much faster and saved everyone a lot of time. I had phone screens with three different people--early stage conversations that weren't in depth technical interviews. They kept saying they were going to bring me in for an in person interview but never seemed to quite pull the trigger on getting it scheduled. Eventually they sent me a coding test to do at home. Although the position was billed as a director level role, the coding test was more suited to an entry level software developer. I completed the coding test because I always like to bring a positive attitude to any interview process until a decision is made, but I've learned that being asked to do coding tests for which one is overqualified often presage a rejection for being overqualified. Indeed I was rejected after the coding test. They claimed that they informed me of the rejection shortly thereafter but I never got the email and didn't find out until I followed up a month later.
I was--and still am--basically happy where I am now and am not actively looking. However, a VC friend with contacts at Percolate offered to introduce me to these guys, pointing out correctly that it never hurts to interview occasionally no matter how happy one is with one's current role. Indeed, he gave me a very nice introduction. I was also excited to hear about their Series C round earlier this year and was intrigued by their business model. So I figured it was worth talking to these guys. However the overall sense was that they felt they couldn't completely ignore me because of the VC's strong introduction but were very lukewarm about me as a candidate. Companies which are serious about candidates just move faster--for example, in my current job I was brought in for an in person interview in another city less than a week after starting the process. In the end, though, Percolate just took up way too much of my time for a process that never moved past the early phone pre screen stage. I'm rating the interview difficulty as 'very easy' because the process never moved past the easy early stages to the more challenging technical interviews.
