Process was 6 interviews; I applied early August 2017. I was offered and happily accepted the job offer and package, but later the same day a stakeholder from outside of the merchandising team (in my view with their personal interests at heart) vetoed the offer based on a two-minute conversation with me (details below).
1. Recruiter phone screen. Recruiter came back afterwards and said there was a manager position opening on hiring manager’s team. (16/08/2017)
2. A person in a leadership position (the hiring manager) interviewed me in person. S/he was very personable and professional. Feedback was positive.
3. Analytical test in person with a middle manager. I was shown five categories and the online sales funnel conversion data for each step (category, list, product page, cart, order). I had to make various calculations in response to questions that were partly designed to trip candidates up, e.g. asking how much price needed to be cut to meet a higher revenue target when actually demand was inelastic and price could simply be increased. Feedback was that I had passed. (12/09/2017)
4. Video call with a middle manager. We had a general Q&A about my experience and Wayfair. Feedback was positive. (14/09/2017, 12pm)
5. Video call with someone in a leadership position. S/he introduced herself and then I did, and answered some general experience and Wayfair questions. Feedback was positive. (14/09/2017, 1pm)
6. Call with hiring manager offering me the job, outlining the salary of £60k base, £20k OTE bonus and 3,000 stock units, which I accepted. Hiring manager outlined the plan for the first three months and said s/he was going to tell HR to complete the paperwork. (20/09/2017, 10am)
7. 2-minute Video call to Berlin with a person in a leadership position. Interviewer (I quote) "hijacked" the start of my video call with the senior manager (details below), with no prior warning I would be meeting him/her, so no opportunity to prepare. He/she knew about me for a period of time prior to the meeting, as he/she knew about some of my experience, but I felt he/she was uncomfortable with the fact I had some experience that overlapped with his function. He/she opened the conversation by aggressively challenging me to explain where the territory lines were drawn between what I would be doing and what he/she and the data scientist he/she was planning to hire would be doing. I was very taken aback by his/her confrontational approach, given we had never met, but when I spoke, I stayed very calm, polite and measured. After what I would describe as his/her "territorial challenge", he/she spoke rapidly about machine learning and how that was the only way that site search would be managed at Wayfair (he/she didn't go on to explain the full picture though, i.e. how a human being has to program and develop a machine-learning model). He/she abruptly ended the meeting and left after a couple of minutes (20/09/2017, 4.30pm)
8. Video call with a middle manager immediately following the call with the leader in Berlin, where s/he downloaded rapidly to me many of her/his current tasks for around 15 minutes. S/he seemed stressed out. (20/09/2017, ~4.33pm)
The final step was for the hiring manager to email me and tell me that - despite s/he having offered the job and me immediately accepting on the morning of 20th Sept - due to the leader in the penultimate meeting having come back after our brief conversation and vetoing the job offer for relatively minor reasons, s/he had reluctantly had to withdraw the offer. (25/09/2017). This was obviously a terrible situation for her/him (and me, needing the job to support my family as the only breadwinner), and my guess as to the background is that the leader knew about me in advance of my interview, had decided that he/she would not accept working with me on any aspect of site search, and had positioned his/her two-minute meeting (which I had no prior knowledge was going to happen) as a premeditated way to reject my application, even though I had much more to offer the business than purely site search expertise (i.e. experience other than site search which had gained me positive feedback in previous interviews, but which he/she didn't explore). I would of course have been more than happy to leave site search to him, but because he/she left the interview so abruptly and intently we didn't have a chance to explore any ways of working together. I felt that his/her actions in the interview and his/her veto of my job offer afterwards amounted to a slightly absurd fait accomplis, just as the "i's were being dotted and the t's being crossed" on my contract. I was advised by several recruitment contacts of mine that there was probably nothing I could have said to that person that would have kept him/her from vetoing my offer.