The interviewer I spoke with was respectful and personable. I was ultimately rejected, but Eight Sleep seems like a good company to work at, based on my first impressions during this interview.

TLDR - The process started off well, got increasingly shady, and ended in total lack of communication and frankly unethical hiring practices. I first had two interviews — one with the hiring manager, and the other with one of the co-founders. The hiring manager interview was laid-back, while the co-founder interview felt like I was being grilled for 45 minutes. While intense, nothing felt out of the ordinary at this point. I was then asked to prepare a presentation for the entire brand marketing team. This is where things started getting a little weird - the prompts I was given required me to prepare campaign strategies for Eight Sleep, as opposed to a hypothetical company/scenario. This is usually the type of work that will require some form of payment, as I was literally doing work for them that they could use if they wanted. But of course, this was not offered or mentioned. I found this to be a little strange, but I just went along with it at the time because Eight Sleep was one of my top choices in my job search and I wanted to minimize any possible friction. The process took a truly awful turn a few days after the presentation. The hiring manager called me and extended me a “soft offer,” where they outlined the tentative salary and job responsibilities. I was not given any information about equity, benefits, start date, and other factors that any candidate would expect to learn about before signing an offer. I told them I was excited about the opportunity and was prepared to review a formal offer letter and/or contract, and the manager said the team would get to work on it right away. After a couple of days, the manager reached back out to apologize for the delay, and that they would send me the offer as soon as they had it. When three more days passed and no offer came through, I emailed them again to check in. The response I got was completely shocking. Despite being told they were working on sending me an offer, I was suddenly being told that they had to move onto another candidate because they were waiting too long for a decision from me. Mind you, this is after they said they wanted me for the job and confirmed twice that they were working on sending me something. I immediately asked for clarity on the situation, and they said that they typically don’t send full contracts until the candidate has fully committed to joining the company, and that I misunderstood them. I told them I did not feel comfortable whatsoever with this hiring practice, and that was the end of our communication. After spending several hours speaking to the Eight Sleep team and preparing an extensive presentation for them, the way I was dropped for wanting basic information about the offer package remains completely unacceptable. I do feel as though I’ve dodged a bullet now, but @Eight Sleep HR, if you’re reading this, fix your hiring processes ASAP.