The interview process was pretty straightforward with 2 rounds of interviews. I interviewed with Butternut Box in March 2021 for a Lead Product Designer role. I remember the first round was with the Internal Recruiter and she was nice and easy to talk with. I passed the 1st stage and the 2nd stage was a design task. It took me 5 days to complete the task and still nowadays I’ve never done so much work in an interview process, I spent around 25 hours of research, planning, sketching and designing for this task. I managed to put together a high fidelity prototype on Figma showcasing UX improvements, asking questions to junior designers and improving the user engagement and I didn’t even get an opportunity to discuss with anyone inside the company about what I did. Not even a phone call. I only got a reply by email 2 weeks later by the internal recruiter stating: “We felt your task reflected the right product and design sense but overall your design style doesn't quite fit with ours and we feel this is something hard to teach and have seen in other tasks. We wish you all the best going forward and thanks for taking the time to meet with us.” It’s true it’s been almost 2 years since I interviewed with them but when I see that the creative sector, specially UI/UX have been a lot of layoffs recently. I think companies take advantage of design tasks to get new ideas for free without considering how much effort candidates put. It’s true they didn’t ask me to put this amount of hours to work on a design task, but now I’m on the other side where I interview designers to hire. And the truth is if I see anybody putting so much effort on getting a job, creating a very detailed solution the very least they get is an interview to talk about the design task later. My advice to potential designers interviewing in Butternut Box is to stay away from them. Your time is better spent in other companies where they value the work you’ve done in your personal time.