For clarity, I am employed full-time and had already decided that this was not a good fit for me, so this review is not a result of the rejection. I am also fortunate enough to have had a lot of interview experience lately, and I find that companies' posts can be misleading.
My phone interview was a bit awkward. I was scheduled with a specific person, and I spent a decent amount of time researching this person to form appropriate topics of discussion. Apparently this person was "too busy" to do my phone interview, so someone else called in his place. This could be a test of its own?
The gal that performed my phone interview had only worked at the company for seven or eight months and was not in charge of any aspect of the hiring process (not HR nor the hiring staff), and as such, found it difficult to answer most of my questions. She was super friendly and warm, so at least it was conversational, but it was not what I had prepared for.
I received a call to schedule an in-person interview (after the gal tried to schedule me for my "first initial phone interview" again) and readily adjusted my schedule to meet the two-hour time frame for which I was scheduled. When I received the written confirmation, the directions were for an address in Arizona (I'm in Denver). Having read a previous post here about the awful travel experience, I immediately was concerned that I had somehow been scheduled for the same situation. I guess it's an easy error, but I was happy to have caught the problem and resolved the issue quickly, while I wondered how many other people would have entered that into their GPS on interview day and had no resolve. They later sent a form letter to the candidates correcting the error, which I assume would not have been caught if I, as a candidate, had not brought it to their attention early. (I also found a personal annoyance with the fact that all correspondence/interview times were scheduled to Central Standard Time as opposed to my local Mountain Standard Time, which would be typical business practice.)
I had also received a schedule with the persons with whom I would be meeting. The day prior to my interview, I emailed the gal in HR to confirm that these were still the four people I should expect to meet, and this was verified. I researched each of them, and in my standard practice, made high-quality presentations of my resume for each of the four people (spending over $22 on paper, printing, and materials) only to find out upon arrival that I would be meeting with eight people.
The interviews were in sets of two, two, three, and one (interviewers). It felt very impersonal and more like speed-dating than interviewing. As a professional, I prefer to be able to express my positive qualities in an interview as opposed to feeling as though I am defending myself to a board. On the plus side, it was nice to be exposed to so many different personalities within the team. Unfortunately, I found myself wondering if I was repeating myself to the same people, or if what I was saying was new to this "round", and it was quite distracting after a couple hours. I found it irritating that I had (expensively) prepared four resume packets and was short by half as a result of the unexpected additional people; I pride myself on preparedness and proper presentation.
The folks were nice enough, but I learned that several of the people interviewing me had been at the company for very short lengths of time, and as a current Manager myself, I'm not sure people with a shorter tenure (far less than a year in several cases) have acquired the skills to judge new teammates.
The in-person interviews were not as prepared as they could have been and, for the most part, were quite canned. Both on the phone and in person, I was asked to explain the "several gaps" in my employment history over the last five years - I've been employed at my company non-stop for over six.