Two days after sending in my application, I got an email with instructions on a very vague data project. I was given a week to reply with my results. A week after sending my results in, I emailed the recruiter to ask about my status, and was told I didn't get the position.

I put in my application online. In 3 days a recruiter contacted me and asked me to return a take-home data science exercise within a week. I wasn't given any notice/option to delay it, but at the same time the assignment was not one that should take that long to come up with a reasonable result, so I felt this was ok. After a week, I emailed the recruiter to check in and he confirmed that Spotify wanted to move forward. We scheduled a phone screen with one of the team members the person hired into the role would be working with. This was basically a conversation with another data scientist; if you know what you're talking about they can tell (and vice versa). That went well so we scheduled an onsite. The onsite was incredibly pleasant and fun. No games, no trick questions. Just talking to competent, smart people about what they do, and about my work. I was asked to go into details of how I would approach certain data/modeling problems, choices I've made in my projects, etc. Honestly, at several points I forgot I was on an interview, I just felt like I was talking with a coworker. HR was also very transparent and efficient throughout the whole process. The process took about a month start to finish, but for one week of that I was unavailable. I thought that everyone was really professional and overall it was a great experience.