Protracted and in the end a waste of time, effort and fuel. Step 1. There were discussions with the staffing company which initially reached out to me. 2. There was a face-to-face interview with several members of the company at their offices. 3. There was assignment #1 - review their website and other analytics data and be prepared to discuss during a 2nd face-to-face interview. 4. 2nd face-to-face interview at their offices with most of the same top-level people where they probed for free consulting advise. 5. Request to take a personality/behavior assessment in prep for what would have been a 3rd face-to-face interview at their offices.
This is where things broke down in the interview process as I informed the company's interview personnel that I would consider whether I wished to take the assessment again having taken it a couple of years back for a different company. This obviously caused someone at the company to have a temper tantrum and thus even though I was a top, if not THE top, candidate for the role and extremely well-qualified to fill it I might add, they told the staffing firm (from Step #1) to inform me (they informed me via text of course even though we had been communicating quite a bit by phone until this point), that the company felt that I was "more than they were looking for in this position" and they were moving on. So after several lengthy trips to their offices, hours of interview, hours of looking at their website and other data, and of course giving them what basically amounted to some free consulting, I get dropped. Another fine example of the malady that exists in the hiring process in some companies where people's egos and "sensitive feelings" get in the way of objective decision-making.