The first interview was entirely informational through their head of HR. Shortly after the interview she gave me an Excel case study to do over the weekend (easy 3 statement forecast and DCF) and wanted a two page summary. The materials I received weren't super well formatted, and she didn't respond to any of my questions, but nothing at this point was too catastrophic. After submission, the follow up call was not with the hiring manager, but with her instead. I've been in the industry for a number of years and knew the assessment materials I submitted were very solid. She said on the call that my model "was not up to par with their expectations" and the reasons she gave were grammar, formatting, and bad assumptions. I asked her where the grammar errors were (on my 2 slides of PowerPoint...) and there was a 15 second pause on the call where I assume she was trying to find some... She couldn't find any grammar errors and adamantly suggested that we focus on the model instead. To which point she asked me several times if "I used the DCF for the model assessment" verbatim. The DCF summary literally starts at row 4. At this point, I was suspecting that she made up all the feedback. She then said my "model assumptions were bad." I asked for more details but she couldn't give me any. I wasted a few sentences saying that even if the assumptions were bad, which they weren't... the assumptions were easily changeable because I built the model to be that way. As all models are supposed to be. There's just no way a hiring manager in this industry would provide feedback this far from reality so something was going on. Either way you swing it, massive red flags. I've been told to take every interview regardless of whether you'll accept or not. And I'm pretty glad I did in this case because of how ridiculously terrible and interesting this interview experience was. I never write reviews but I felt like I had to here just to warn others about the process. I don't care if I was dinged because the position itself had closed or because my Facebook picture isn't pretty enough, but please don't make lies about my assessment materials and act independently from your firm. I wished there were others from the firm involved in the process to keep HR accountable.