Went through the full Unilever software engineer interview process earlier this year for a backend role on one of their digital commerce teams (London-based, hybrid). Took about 6 weeks start to finish. Sharing the breakdown because there's not much out there specifically for tech roles at consumer goods companies.
The stages:
Stage 1: Recruiter screen. Pretty standard 20-minute call. They asked about my background, confirmed I was comfortable with the hybrid setup, and explained the process. No surprises. They were actually quite responsive on email, which I appreciated.
Stage 2: Online assessment. More on this in a separate post, but it's a timed coding platform (HackerRank-style). Two problems, 90 minutes total. This is the filter stage. If you don't pass, the rest doesn't matter.
Stage 3: Technical phone screen. About an hour with a senior engineer. We went through my CV, then one medium-difficulty algorithmic problem (graph traversal, nothing exotic), then roughly 15 minutes of system design lite, mostly "how would you think about scaling this."
Stage 4: Final loop. Three back-to-back interviews over Zoom. One was coding (two problems, easier than I expected), one was a proper system design round lasting about 50 minutes, and one was behavioral. The behavioral was with a tech lead and focused heavily on cross-functional collaboration, dealing with ambiguous requirements, and how I've handled production incidents.
Overall: the process is more structured than I expected for a FMCG company. The interviewers were clearly following a scorecard. Don't walk in expecting FAANG-style difficulty, but don't underestimate the behavioral side. They care a lot about how you work with non-technical stakeholders, which makes sense given that most of their tech teams are embedded in business units.
Total time from first recruiter email to offer: 42 days. Feedback loop was decent. I got actionable notes after the phone screen, which is rare.
Happy to answer questions.