They ghost candidates after asking to do a take-home project. It is okay to be unsuccessful with the job application, but not okay for the company to silently abandon it. You will know that you were unsuccessful only when you call the recruiter. No details will be provided, which is somewhat unfair. The process was fairly simple - initial screen call, following with the take-home assignment to design a system on a minimum budget, and then to defend it as you do with your final year project. I did a fair amount of work, prepared a 10+ pages document, but was a bit stressed during the interview. My guess is that they were looking for somebody more vocal and/or less expensive. This experience has proven the old IT adage - don't put your heart and soul into any unpaid take-home assignments, or even better do not agree to do them at all. It will be a complete waste of time in most cases.

There were three parts to the interview. An initial screener of about 45 mins. In this interview they asked about what I was doing and my reasons for looking to move. Then followed by a number of short technical questions. The next stage was a technical audition to spend a couple of hours offline designing a system to perform a set task. The last stage was a follow up interview to explain the technical design and how to scale it up. Both interviews were quite informal. The interviewers were friendly and whilst some questions were difficult, they didn't appear to be trying to trick me.