I went through the entire process. Got that coveted final interview! Arrived 20 minutes early at Itasca office looked sharp in the suit and had everything prepared.
My first realization was how completely disorganized this company is about its hiring process in person. There is no one in the lobby, and the floor HR told me to go to was not the floor my interview was on.
I was told 10 minutes before my job interview that the position that i had been researching for the past few weeks and prepared an entire presentation for was not the position i was interviewing for...
Instead they said they were interviewing me for a position on their marketing team.
HR told me nothing my recruiter told me nothing: A VERY unprofessional move.
So now through no fault of my own I was by default unprepared for this interview. Worse still the manager in charge knew this would happen through his decision making and made no effort to warn me in a timely manner. It's very difficult to transition from "I'll take any job here" to "I'm the best person for this position" when the person interviewing you knows you had no clue about that position 10 minutes ago.
The interview structure and length is only suited for 2 people to be asking you questions, but they invited a third worker in, so prepare to have to interrupt someone, back track the conversation to make your point, and scramble to give a lot of very specific information out about why you're the best person for this position in response to very general interview questions.
At a certain point in the interview the employer actually assumed i didn't research the company, made that a mental point against me, and asked me an unrelated question before i could even rebuke his assertion with my own evidence to the contrary.
I didn't even see the person who I was interviewing with, could not gauge if i had answered his question satisfactorily, and couldn't read his reaction. I was told their video conferencing software broke just for my interview and that other candidates had been able to see and interact with the manager who was interviewing them. It's pretty easy to reject someone when you know they haven't seen you before.
At the end of the interview they told me i would receive a phone call in a week. This did not happen, I had to call HR directly after that week had elapsed. They sent me a mass generated email that I'd been rejected later that evening.
Keyence is an amazing company with great products. They have streamlined their interview process using the most state of the art HireVue software, Caliper personality testing, and Bennett testing. However, they completely sucked the humanity out of my in person interview and behaved very unfairly towards me.
Could I have done a better job during my interview? Yes, I'm not perfect and have been practicing. Will i ever get another fair opportunity at Keyence? Probably not, and that sucks because it was the best opportunity I had to accelerate my career at the time.
In the end, the only reasonable conclusion I have is that I was brought in as a wild card candidate to help the hiring manager decide between other candidates and was not actually being taken seriously for the job. Very smart move, but in my case it was pulled off with zero subtlety.
PROTIP: If you hear them talk about how many candidates they interviewed for the position and what it means that you made it this far through all the testing consider it the impending rejection bell tolling for your interview and get back to that specific evidence on why you'd be best for the job. Good luck! you'll need it!