Company recruiter got in touch with me after online application. First was arranged an informational phone interview that lasted about an hour. Helpful in terms of getting an insight into company culture, values, processes. Then, I was sent a full-stack design skills self-assessment sheet to fill out, where I rated myself in areas like strategy, user research, interaction design, information architecture, interface design, etc. on a rating scale from entry-level to lead/expert.
Based on this, a technical one-on-one phone interview was set up with a senior/lead designer with a research background. This lasted about an hour. We went over generic interview questions you can expect at any design interview such as one's design process, taking and receiving feedback, leadership skills questions, how to work around difficult client situations or how you collaborate with different types of stakeholders, etc. This interview was a pleasure; interviewer was very amiable, upbeat, sincere and articulate. I found out quite a lot about how a day of a designer might be like at ThoughtWorks.
After this, a second one-on-one video interview was set up on Fuze (technically troublesome) with another lead/practice lead designer with more of a software development background. During this interview, she probed a little bit more into specifics of my resume and portfolio. This was a bit of an uncomfortable interview for me. The interviewer yawned all the time, left 5 minutes for me to ask any questions, repeated some questions twice and made me feel like I was wasting her time towards the end.
I was not very excited about the opportunity after the 3rd interview as I didn't feel the click, realized the role would not be making good use of my creative skillset and would help me explore areas I wanted to grow in. They also decided not to go forward with my application and were nice enough to provide feedback when I asked for it. This feedback was valuable but not very constructive, only listing why they didn't move forward. It sounded like it was based on the last interviewer's impression of my past experience, which was a bit off and not comprehensive but that might also be due to my not articulating well during the interview as I was pretty distracted that day. Regardless, I appreciated the response as not many places even bother to follow up or respond to such questions.
Interviews were definitely worth the time invested. I left with the impression that the staff is generally skilled, smart, amiable, transparent and proactive about problems they experience at work. Some of these were: your work experience might vary a lot depending on what project or team you end up being assigned to; you would have to put in extracurricular time and networking effort for your career-development, especially as there is no design team or managers / mentorship / guidance but still communication channels are open; while the company scaled fast, management did not develop themselves as fast and were lacking in leadership skills; there is a lot of ambiguity you would have to compensate for which is stressful; the company is proud of their social consciousness but it is only one team / department that gets to work on such projects; traveling might mean you will spend 4 days at client site / hotel in a given week...