Lengthy and insulting to my experience. Interview process far too complete and disjointed involving too many people so nobody gets a well rounded opinion of you.
1. Asked to do a programming task in advance which was expected to take 2-4 hours but ended up spending a lot longer due to wanting to do a proper job of it. Good task with well defined requirements but quite a lot of work to do for a screening interview. Task was not mentioned at all during phone or face to face interviews.
2. Received 45 minute minute phone call going through my CV and experience, pleasant conversation although did not get the person I was told I would be getting. Proceeded to face-to-face expected to take 3 hours.
3. Asked to complete an online competency task 1-1.5 hours.
4. Arrive at interview, told to complete a further java coding exercise simpler than the one done before phone interview but taking requirements from interviewers. Bad communication throughout, I kept having to prompt for requirements as they kept asking why I hadn't done things a certain way. This takes approx one hour and then I'm told there will be two more stages with two separate sets of interviewers.
5. Next challenge is a design exercise to create a RESTful service, this seems to go quite well and establish a good rapport with the interviewers.
6. Last interview: An algorithm design session, supposed to be challenging, completed with some prompting but explained working etc.
7. Interviewers consult each other in private and then I am asked to stick around for a while to engage in an after work social event (including being offered beer!), I take this to be a good sign.
8. On leaving I'm told that the head of software will need to chat with me as a final stage after the weekend as he was not in the office.
9. No response from recruiter or any other feedback, I contact Mendeley's office directly for some feedback and I'm told the had reservations about my Java fundamentals. I don't buy it. I felt like I had been hung out to dry and wasted a lot of my time on this. I wish they'd told me they had no confidence in my Java skills after submitting the lengthy coding exercise which was never discussed in the interview.