I initially applied in early November, 2013. I got a reply from one of the recruiters about a week later. After talking to the recruiter on the phone and emailing back and forth for a while, she realized that I was still in school (graduating mid 2014) and transferred me to another recruiter.. or rather a bunch of different recruiters who couldn't seem to figure out who I should be talking to. Eventually we got everything sorted out (now in January 2014) and I did two phone interviews. They both went well and shortly after, they arranged for me to fly to Seattle for a "university day". They put me up in a nice hotel across the street from the office and, of course, paid for meals and everything. They even set up direct deposit for the reimbursement, which was nice.
The day of the interviews, I arrived in the morning and signed in and then I was met by a couple recruiters. There were also a few intern candidates but no other full time candidates. I had 3 interviews that were all fairly interesting. The first one was mostly a fit interview, the second was the in depth coding interview and the third was a combination of talking about experience and doing some coding.
After the interviews, we did a tour of the office and then we met with a bunch of engineers for a Q&A session. This was a really great way to learn about the company and see how everything works there. It seemed like a really great place to work with lots of really smart engineers though I was mildly concerned about the apparent lack of organization.
In the afternoon, one of the recruiters took us downtown for Seattle's "Underground Tour" which was really neat and later they took us out to a super fancy Italian restaurant which was excellent. Overall, it was a really great day.
About a week later, I got an email from one of the recruiters asking for references and my transcript. I have an almost perfect transcript (straight A's) and I was certain that my references would say nice things about me so I felt that I had the job in the bag at this point. One of my references forwarded me the questionnaire they sent him. It was just generic questions like "How did you know him?", "Would you hire him again?", "What were his strongest/weakest attributes?" This reference included his answers which were all extremely positive, re-enforcing the idea in my mind that I was going to get an offer.
A week or so after this, I heard from the recruiter again asking me to do more phone interviews. Supposedly, it was "great news that [they] still [wanted] to move forward with [me]" but I didn't really take it that way. Frankly, I find it rude and unprofessional that they would waste the time of my references if they weren't already prepared to make an offer. However, I, of course, went through with the phone interviews, uncertain what they could possibly learn about me that they hadn't already figured out in the first five interviews.
The first of the second round of phone interviews (6th interview overall) went very poorly as the interviewer has a very strong accent and a horrible phone line (lots of static). I could barely understand what he was asking which made it very difficult. I contacted the recruiter about this and she seemed at least somewhat understanding. She then booked another phone interview which went quite well, as far as I could tell.
Finally, the week after this (now into March), I got a rejection letter which I was rather dumbfounded by. I can't for the life of me figure out where I went wrong or why they would bother contacting references if they weren't prepared to make an offer.