It's a long process that took me a couple of months. They don't tell you ahead of time what's involved. Be prepared, it's A LOT of work. None of the steps were particularly difficult, but you have to put in the time and effort. 1. General interview, 30-60 min (process, skills, case study walkthrough) 2. Take-home assignment, minimum of 8 hours (design challenge, unpaid) 3. Second interview, 30-60 min (spend about 20 min presenting assignment, follow-up questions) 4. Received offer 5. Portfolio preparation (must include a minimum of 6 projects, 6-9 slides per project) 6. Portfolio review (I went through 2 review cycles before having it approved) 7. Portfolio approval 8. Legal documents and payment setup I spent about twice the suggested time on the take-home assignment. I passed all interviews quite easily. They were very happy with my portfolio, only had to make minor edits. But it's a lot of work and I have no idea if any of it will pay off. It hasn't been a transparent process and for that reason I'm not very impressed with Toptal yet.

When I applied to be a UX designer on the Toptal network, the interview process was a four step process - an initial screening, a portfolio review, an interview talking through one of my projects on my portfolio (which I got to choose), and a test project & presentation. This was a really in-depth process, and they really want to see a designer's thought process behind their designs, so if you apply, make sure you're prepared with all of your design artifacts before your calls (for example- I was asked to talk through my script for usability tests/reasoning behind specific UI elements/etc.). Overall, the interview process requires a good bit of work, but in my experience, I felt it was a fair process.