It took about three weeks from the first contact. I was referred to the hiring team by a friend who works in the department. HR emailed me to schedule an initial phone interview for the following week. That call was very short and very basic. Simple "what do you do in this or that situation" personality questions, as well as some others (for example, "what made you interested in software development?"). Follow up technical phone interview was about a week later. The guy called me and it was a very relaxed, conversational interview. The questions didn't feel very technical at the time (he didn't ask what I knew about any specific techs), but after it was over I realized he had been asking non-technical questions in a way that allowed me to talk freely and widely about my tech knowledge, without necessarily being prompted to do so. His technique was really great. I went in for an in-person interview at the Chicago office and the first half went very well. I met with the team lead and he was welcoming and very interested in my background, which is mostly in creative and financial fields, not related to software. He showed me around the office and handed me off to another guy for the second half of the interview, where things turned for the worse. The second half was a paired-programming section, and the guy with whom I was to do this was...a little awkward. Don't get me wrong, he was nice enough in his manner, but he should not be doing these kinds of interviews. He rushed through introductions and got right into the programming section, which was refactoring an application they were currently working on. I didn't have any experience in Java, IntelliJ, TDD, or refactoring enterprise apps, so it was all new to me (which isn't necessarily a problem, since this department hires people with no experience with JavaEE or Java in general all the time, my friend included). But the guy kept talking and trailing off so that I didn't understand what he was saying. By the time I started thinking, "is he expecting me to finish his sentences for him? Is he trying to ask me questions and test my knowledge without actually asking me a question?" he had already moved onto the next thing. It didn't help that he was using terminology I wasn't familiar with to refer to concepts I did actually know and could talk about (he used some weird term for encapsulation, so I didn't understand the question until the interview was almost over). I could go on, but you probably get the picture: failed communication and not a good lead through the process. Not necessarily the guy's fault, though. I would put it on the management for letting that guy interview candidates.