Things actually started with a homework writing assignment. I've gotten these before, but this is the first time a company has demanded one before even the first real conversation. It's also the first one I've encountered that took two hours to finish, mostly because the material was an error-prone and sometimes incomprehensible mess -- itself a red flag.
Three weeks later, the first meeting finally took place. My half-hour with the senior member was perfectly normal and pleasant, but then I got passed off to three junior members, where things went downhill. They pretty much stuffed the entire session wall-to-wall with nothing but variations on the question "Tell me a time you did X?" These seemed designed to gauge how well you'd work on a team, but they sometimes got oddly specific (I didn't always have a memory to match the exact scenario), and seemed largely superficial. This was primarily a writing job, but the subject of writing never came up -- they couldn't discuss the homework, nor had they bothered to glance at my portfolio. Nothing else really came up, either.
If their MO is to filter out candidates on silly, arbitrary questions that could be asked at any time, they could at least show some consideration by conducting the screener before insisting on a lengthy homework assignment that, in the end, they don't seem to care much about anyway. Am I wrong?
As it stands, my take-home impression is that the Nashville content team is a filled with insubstantial people who have no clue how to evaluate a candidate's merits, and have no respect for people's time.