The hiring process is pretty tortuous—HR has a lot of difficulty communicating with hiring managers, and requisitions and whatnot have a tendency to get lost or dropped. Pretty nerve-wracking from an outsider, but par for the course. Unfortunately I don't have advice about whether or not to pester the hiring manager or not—oftentimes the issue lies with HR. Still, diligence is recommended. Very relaxed interview overall. Mine was a three-step process: * Interview with HR: Very informal, almost a chat. This person can give a thumbs-up but it's kind of inconsequential compared to the hiring manager's perception, obviously. * Interview with team: Seven people were there in all, no hiring manager. Firing questions from everyone. A little hair-raising at first but the large group actually means there's less time to overthink since the questions tend to be pretty rapid-fire. * Interview with hiring manager: Your standard one-on-one.

I applied for an analyst role posted on HomeAway's careers page. Shortly after, an HA recruiter reached out to me asking to set up a phone screening. On my call with the recruiter I was asked why I was interested in working for HomeAway, to elaborate on my past work experience, to talk about my technical experience, and why I was interested in the role I was applying for. Following the phone screening with the recruiter, I was invited to have a video call with the hiring manager--the hiring manager asked general questions about why I was interested in the position, my past experience working with data analysis, why I was interested in working at HomeAway, and what I knew about SEO. Following the interview with the hiring manager, I was given an open ended use case--I was given the freedom to pick any publicly available data source from Big Query and asked to analyze the data and put together a presentation telling a story about the data and my analysis. I gave my presentation to the hiring manager and director of the team via video conference. Following my use case presentation, I was invited to the office to interview in person with two managers from the Growth Marketing team as well as the director on the team.