I first talked with the recruiter. Then had a 30 minutes meeting with a team member. Then they sent me a take home assessment that had a 3 days window to work on. Then they reviewed my code and agreed to setup a 1.5 hour for me to present my solution and ask me more questions about my solution and background. I didn't get an offer because they said "there were other candidates that were more aligned with the industries that they have clients at". I found this type of interview practice unfair. Allowing candidates to work on a problem for 3 days takes so much of their time and considering this super competitive job market, many candidates might very well spend the entire 3 days coding! Specially that the dataset that they gave us was a music dataset, something that needed extra time to figure out how to read and extract features from. And yet there is no guarantee from Deloitte to meet with them for the next step. Also the candidate now has to spend a lot of time preparing a presentation. I ended up spending total of maybe 20 hours for coding and preparing the presentation, all gone to waste. I have had other "take home assessments" and can say the way that some other companies do it is more fair. One company gave me only 8 hours to work on in, including preparing the presentation. AND, they said I'll be guaranteed to move to the final round, which is 3 interviews, each 45 minutes, by just submitting my solution. I felt much better about this practice because by me spending 8 hours I know they are committed to spend over 2 hours for next steps with me. Also, if I wasn't a good fit because of the industry this is something Deloitte could have filtered me out for before sending me the take home assessment!

My experience with the interview process at Deloitte USI was extremely disappointing, spanning nearly 3 months and ultimately wasting my time. From the beginning, I made my expected CTC clear to the HR team, yet they chose to proceed despite knowing it might be outside their budget. The interview process included: 1. First Technical Round 2. Communication Round 3. Second Technical Round 4. Manager Round – The manager specifically asked about my expected CTC, and I reiterated what I had already shared with HR. 5. Leader/Partner Round After completing all these rounds, I was asked to fill out a Pre-Hire Survey and submit my documents. This alone took another 7 days. Despite all my effort and transparency throughout the process, they came back with a lowball offer. The offer was only INR 20K higher than my current fixed salary and, when variables/bonuses were factored in, actually INR 1L less than my current CTC. The HR response was consistently poor, with little communication or clarity. Given the timeline and effort involved, it was incredibly frustrating to receive an offer that didn’t meet my clearly stated expectations. If my compensation expectations were out of their budget, they should have stopped the process at the beginning instead of dragging it out for 3 months. This experience was a complete waste of time, and I will never attend interviews with this company again.