[shalmanese]

I'd be wary of almost any startup that hired without any form of interviewing whatsoever. The big difference is that you walk into the interview as a default-yes rather than a default-no, ie: they're on the lookout for any red flags that would cause them to have serious reservations but if no flags pop up, you're assumed in.

At big companies, there's more of a formal process but the key is get the attention of the hiring manager and make sure that hiring manager has enough juice to quietly backchannel to whatever process to treat this as a default-yes conversation. A good sign of how effective your manager is at a Bigcorp is how well they know how to work their internal system to get the right people onto their team.