The first stage was a recruiter phone call, and he was very nice. I was moved to the next stage which was an assignment asking for 8 unique strategic initiatives for the year. I honestly was a bit taken aback by this ask because they could easily use my initiatives in the future, but I continued forward. I was moved to the hiring manager interview where she made it a point to mention twice that they were also interviewing internally which I felt wasn't necessary to mention to me as a candidate. It reaffirmed my suspicions that they could just be using this interview process to get strategies from candidates and move forward with an internal hire. This left a bad taste in my mouth.