Generally, you sit down to a meal or coffee with the executive in question; they answer your questions and try to convince you to join.
That conversation might span a few sit-downs or extend into e-mails.
If you eventually say “yes”, you’ll be funneled into the hiring pipeline midstream, skipping the entire front-end process.
It’s largely a formality — HR is told to hire you unless there’s a glaring red flag.
When I’ve been in that position, I wasn’t even asked for my resume until after we’d already negotiated my compensation, solely for inclusion in my HR file.
Hopefully they skip that step but it is weird how often a recruiting process goes from having a recruiter cold contact you with platitudes singing your praises and how valuable you would be to their company and then the next step is to have a group of interviewers demanding to know why you're worthy of being in their presence while expecting you operate like a broken clone of Google and also recite CS theory that has never been even slightly applicable to the open position. But at least the 'inside-out condom' brain teaser has finally gone out of favor.
Sigh, I've been on the receiving end of that multiple times. :)
In some companies (the ones that aren't just cargo-culting or on autopilot) I'd bet that someone in HR/compcommittee consciously intends it to be hazing rather than evaluation. Maybe theory like that it makes the company psychologically seem more attractive (the brain thinks, if you're jumping through hoops for them, there must be a reason), and to take candidate's ego down a notch so they're less demanding in compensation negotiation.
How do they conduct the interviews, in that situation?
Not the usual tech megacorp brogrammer "technical interview" hazing?