tl;dr: They have an illegal "Values" step about who you are in your personal life. This step is a dice roll, and you'll only get an offer if the interviewer personally likes you or not. It doesn't matter how well you do at the technical step or the behavioral step.

Full review: The interview was one of the easiest I've done in my career (10/15 years of experience). The three coding exercises were small projects instead of the usual LeetCode medium/hard, and were much more fun.

Multiple interviewers praised me during the interview process, some telling me they were very excited that I might join the company. After the interview was done (7h+), I received a cold, generic two-line rejection message.

After trying to learn more about what I could improve on and whether I could still get an offer at a lower level, I was told by the recruiter that they would look into it. They then came back and told me that they legally cannot provide any feedback and that I am also not fit for any lower-level position.

Based on my experience, both as an interviewee and as an interviewer, this means that I failed the illegal step about "values." This interview step is about them trying to understand who you are in your personal life and outside of work. I worked at several companies where, for our "Values" step, we had to rate people based on whether or not we could see ourselves being real-life friends with the interviewee. This is obviously extremely illegal but sadly quite common.

At the end of the day, most of the people I interacted with were really nice and got me excited about joining the company, but getting a job at Gusto is a dice roll. You have to treat the "Values" step as if it's a date and hope that it goes well enough that the other person wants you to join the company because they are interested in you as a person.

No LeetCodes or such, but small (more realistic) projects instead.