In 2 words: unnecessarily exhausting. 20 emails, 9 text messages, 3 rounds of interviews, 2 rounds of an assignment and presentation, numerous phone call "updates" ... all for nothing. All in all, I'd say I devoted about 30 hours to the application, all the interview preparation, and the case study assignment presentation. For the assignment, they asked me to audit and report my findings on their company website. So the information I provided them with is 100% actionable, and they more or less fooled me into doing it for them for free, without paying me anything, all by dangling the possibility of a job in front of me. I'm not saying it's fraud, but it's not "not fraud" either. The worst part of the assignment is that when I had finished and submitted it, they told me I'd done it wrong. However, I was told the mistake was due to the assignment itself being worded incorrectly; they asked for a .pdf, not a .pptx or some other sort of presentation file, so a .pdf is what I gave them. Because of this mistake I ended up completing what they described as a 5 to 10 hour assignment twice. And then they had the gall to tell me that the assignment was the deciding factor in their decision! There's a word for that: incompetence. The red flags abound... WillowTree is duplicitous. WillowTree is dishonest. WillowTree is disreputable. I discourage all future applicants from wading into this nightmare of a quagmire of disappointment with WillowTree. I should have known when they corrected my description of the company, saying, "We're actually a digital PRODUCT agency, so..." This is the definition of a thinly veiled euphemism, because, as far as I can tell, "Digital Product Agency" is what a digital marketing agency that doesn't want to be called a digital marketing agency calls itself. Finally, please note, I've rated the interview difficulty below as "Very Difficult" but a more correct assessment would be "Labyrinthian" or maybe just "Hellish." There's no need to drag the process out as long as they did for a non-manager/non-director position. There's no need to contact someone so many times they assume they're a shoo-in, only to pull the rug out from underneath them. The red flags accumulate... If I sound bitter, it's because this is all so fresh in my mind. Yes, I'm bitter, but I'm fair, honest, and transparent. In all fairness, I think some of the people at WillowTree were trying to treat me in the same way, they just failed spectacularly. Ultimately, the point is, WillowTree told me they didn't hire me because of an assignment they knew would take longer than the amount of time they told me to devote to it (this point was included in the interview instructions), even though the assignment instructions were so flawed I was asked to do the assignment twice. All in all, it's just very unprofessional and extremely disappointing. If you're reading this and you're still thinking of applying with WillowTree, I'd encourage you to at least keep other options open. It might be a fantastic company to work for, but it's not the only one, and my experience leads me to believe it's not all that great.
