I applied for a designer position online, and several hours later, I received an interview invitation email. I scheduled the time, and everything went well. The Interviewer showed up on time.

There were 4 interviews in total. The first was with talent acquisition, the second was with the hiring manager, the third with with ECD and the forth and final was with the hiring manager and ECD where I presented my brief that was set. The first and second interviews were pretty straight forward and standard questions for a design role were asked. The hiring manager was friendly but seemed quite young and my perception was that she didn’t have much hiring/interviewing experience as she didn’t come across very confident. The interview with the ECD was more positive and they asked great questions and had good knowledge of the team, role and company. The brief that was set was very vague in its asking and had quite an extensive list of deliverables. It used language like ‘we are open to seeing as little (or as much) as you’d like to share’ which I didn’t find particularly helpful. There were also a number of typo’s and graphical errors in the brief which I didn’t think looked very professional. Once I completed the brief I was asked to send it over in advance of the final interview. I presented the brief in the final interview and there were some questions surrounding the brief including if I thought the designs could be motion designed and if so how, which I answered. The hiring manager and ECD were very receptive the the work and I left the interview feeling quite positive with my performance. Despite emailing multiple times (and being ignored) to see if a decision has been made, I was eventually called back over a week later with feedback that they had gone with a candidate with more experience - this was interesting to me as there was only a few years experience gap between myself and the hiring manager. I asked for specific feedback on the task but no such feedback had been given, but HR said they would request this - which they didn’t come back to me with until a month after, when I followed up. HR did say if I saw a role that I would like to apply for to reach out in the future. About a month later, I saw the exact same job advert on the recruitment site so I email Talent to enquire and this is where I got more robust feedback on my brief that I had presented in my last interview. It was mentioned that they would have liked to have seen some simple motion skills showcased and would have liked to have heard my thoughts and creative ideas on how motion could be incorporated into the branding - (just note, they were recruiting for a motion designer at the time in the same team and the question of how motion could be applied was asked in my interview). And they would have liked to have heard my ideas around leveraging creators from our platform (just note - I didn’t think this would be a role of a designer but more of a marketeer). They also mentioned that the team thought it was too soon after my interview experience to be reconsidered for this new role. The positives 1. Friendly talent and hiring team 2. The ECD had good insights into the role, team and company The negatives of the interview process were as followed: 1. Too many interview stages 2. The brief was vague and a list of possible deliverables wasn’t helpful - it should have has a set number of deliverables that were mandatory to respond to in order to give all candidates a fair chance to respond 3. Talent Acquisition need to be more responsive to emails. A number of emails I had sent did not get replies including when I sent the brief over in advance of the interview. 4. They could have made it more clear that motion skills were required for a Graphic Design role 5. Feedback on the task I have put a lot of effort into should have been given from the get go and should have been a mandatory requirement from the hiring manager. The feedback needed to be more robust and constructive