It starts with a call with a fellow lawyer to go through the work they’re doing. In my particular case, my experience did not match exactly the role they needed to fill, other than that it was friendly and professional.

Ridiculous process evidencing a immature firm not ready for prime time. The interview was for a legal counsel role requiring knowledge of broker-dealer, payments, and corporate law and regulation. I went through a phone interview with the hiring manager (who was actually a nice guy) in which we talked about aspects of the legal challenges facing the company and how my legal expertise and experiences may inform solutions to those challenges. (So far, so good). I was then presented with a "challenge task" by the recruiter comprising of two Excel spreadsheets and a API specifications documents and asked to analyze the root cause of an increase in fail hits over a specified period. They encouraged candidates to submit written conclusions along with Excel analyses or database scripts to justify their conclusions. I took a look and played with the data set a little and read through portions of the spec, but quickly realized that this is so far outside of what an attorney would ever do that it would be a waste of my time to go forth with it and a totally irrelevant as a basis of assessing the skill set of a lawyer. I wrote the recruiter that I thought she may have sent me the wrong challenge task and offered to provide legal analysis of some kind as an alternative. Nope, this was the right one; she wanted me to go forth with the data analysis or I wasn't going on to the next stage of the interview. I declined, again offering some demonstration of the skills I am actually bringing to the table. I don't know how attractive an employment opportunity they fancy themselves, but they will never ever be able to recruit lawyers with any modicum of legal expertise making them jump through these kinds of hoops. They may be able to find someone junior and desperate, who will buckle under for whatever senseless and bureaucratic silliness they throw at them, but anyone with a shred of dignity or other employment options will just roll their eyes and politely say "Thank you for speaking with me... Next." I guess whatever attorney they find will also have some kind of SQL skills too (so good on them, I guess). As a final note, if this is indicative of the company's philosophy, employees and investors should run the other way. They will burn through their VC cash soon enough in service of their management's disorganization, immaturity and ego. Take a look at the recent headlines and you will see they are very much on their way.