Submitted my application and received their customary challenge almost immediately. I spent an hour or so working on it (their suggested amount of time), and found that was hardly enough for the challenge they presented. It was very open-ended, which I guess allows them to see how I thought about the problem but also presented a dilemma: should I spend much more time than they suggested or hand in what I had done? I handed in my work of maybe two hours and didn't hear back from them except for a polite "not interested". A little bit in contrast with their stated strategy, I figured I would get a chance to to talk to someone at least.

A recruiter from Spire got in touch with me via Linkedin and invited me to apply for the role. After an initial screening, I was invited to a technical interview with a senior engineer. Following this, I was invited to 4 further interviews with various members of the engineering team. These interviews were billed as "values" based, but turned out to be more technical focused, with many of the questions being repeated between interviewers. I then presented a high level solution to a design challenge that I had been given prior to the 4 interviews, and took questions on my solution. After this, I was invited to another technical interview, as supposedly one of the interviewers hadnt asked all the technical questions they wanted to. In said interview wasnt asked anything I hadnt already been asked prior. I was then invited to a meeting with one of the directors of the company, which lasted 20 minutes and was just a couple of values based questions. All in all this process took approximately 3 weeks. I got a response a week after this, to say that while they think id be a good fit in the company, my experience with Altium as opposed to the other pcb design packages I have used in the past, wasnt up to scratch and they dont have time to accomodate me getting up to speed with it. This was a bit frustrating as that was discussed in the very first technical interview (and then repeatedly afterwards) and if it was such an issue, they couldve saved us both time by not taking the interview process any further. Additionaly, the technical manager had spoken a good game about how they encourage learning and development withtin their environment. He did however let slip about people not switching off from communications outside of office hours, and then tried to retract and play it down, so perhaps they mean that they encourage it entirely in your own time and not on theirs? That would fit in with not having time to accomodate a new start getting up to speed with a software package.