I think it was definitely the worst recruitment process I have ever participated.
It started with a phone call from the HR, which appointed a phone interview. When the time has arrived, nobody has called. I sent email to find out why, without recieving any answer.
A week after, I got call from team leader, and we had nice conversation with regular questions, concerning personal background and experience.
He was honest and talked in a straight-forwardly fashion. In the end we scheduled meeting, which was nice, with some questions on distributed systems synchronization.
The next step was home assignment, which required to get familiar with a new software component and took quite a while.
After I submitted this task, the story became interesting.
After 2 days I got email from HR (we appreciate your interest BUT we have another candidate blah blah...) , It was really strange and I sent message to my interviewer with question - Was my implementation not good enough? (I was sure that I did a pretty good job, and I think that after such time consuming home task, the minimum respect one is owed is to get at least a short explanation what was not good about the assignment).
He was suprised because he didn't check the task yet. He promised to check the issue.
After a couple of days I got a message at morning that my task was good and he will ask to schedule an interview. Great news!
For 2 days I didn't get any call and decided to send a message to interviewer to find out the status.
On the same day I got a funny email from company , they tried to reach me so many times without any success. (The funny part is that I was available all day, my phone got many other calls, and she had the right number because we talked previously.)
Ok, cool. We scheduled another interview (by email) - an HR interview for the next day.
The interview was awful. I have experience in hi-tech and worked for several companies. In one company I had some issues with my new coming team leader and I was honest and told the story.(also because I was asked to tell, and it wasn't a big issue. Just a lack of chemistry and understanding with me and other members of my team). Folks don't do it! Play the game. Some people are capable to understand that 65% of people in this industry searching for new opportunities because of "boss issues", and others - which I can not call specialists - are seeking for clean record even if they hear nonsensical stories.
My bad luck is that I've encountered the second one. 40 minutes I answered a tons of foolish questions about the issue, while totally ignoring my other rich working experience. The interview turned into an interrogation, in which she were trying indirectly to put all the blame on me.
After this unpleasant meeting I got rejected.
I don't have any problem with a company seeking people with a clean record.
But please don't waste candidate's time on many interviews and time-consuming home assignments.