I was contacted by a recruiter in a different state who saw my profile online. (I assume the person was an in house recruiter). I spoke to her. She passed me on to another recruiter in yet another state who also spoke to me and set me up for an interview. This process only took a few days.
The interview process at the local office very long. I was interviewed first by a regional managing attorney (who appeared to be fairly young). My second interview was by the local managing attorney. Both interviews were extremely casual. EXTREMELY casual.
The first part of the interview, the regional manager gave me a fact pattern to review and discuss. You only have a few minutes to review and decide what your course of action would be. It is similar to a bar question. It was a generic question, not tailored to the specific jurisdiction. The interviewer didn't seem that interested in my response though.
The type of interview questions are STAR behavioural questions. This is not a surprise because Progressive says that it interviews based on the STAR technique on its website. However, the focus on the STAR questions was ridiculous. It was basically a 3 hour barrage of generic situation STAR focused questions, first by the regional manager and followed by the local manager. None of these questions were tailored to the work of a litigation attorney. They were all asking about what you would do on "projects", not what you would do in a particular case or at trial. The questions were pointless and several of them asked the same thing.
At the end of the interview, after attempting to give serious and thoughtful responses to the questions for nearly 3 hours, the local manager basically blurts out that Progressive is a "fun" place, and she was interested in having someone she could be a friend with. She said she knew she would hire someone if she could see herself going to dinner with them. Ok? The whole thing was weird. Shortly after that, my interview ended.
Felt like it was a waste of time.
A few days later, one of the out of state recruiters called me to let me know I was not selected because they didn't think I had enough defense experience. I guess that was the excuse the local manager gave them. I don't know. I hope that local manager found a friend.