Referred for a PD role by a friend. Straightforward recruiter call followed by skills/experience zoom with a senior designer. Head of design was due to be on the call but couldn't make it. Next stage was a take-home design task. As more of a UX focused product designer, they stressed how much they wanted to see product thinking over polished visuals. Spent about 8-10 hours on it, wanting to really nail my thinking around the task. Presented my proposals to the head of design plus 2 other designers. Feedback quickly changed to criticism of the designs, rather than the idea, which is not a great thing to do to a candidate. A week later a rejection email came through, misspelling my name, saying that they wanted more visual polish, even thought that wasn't the brief. Various other minor reasons for rejection were included, all of which were very obvious if they looked at my CV and portfolio.