It took 3 months to go from my first email to a VMware recruiter to getting an offer. I interviewed with three different teams. Seems like if they think you are good but don't have the amount of experience that the group you are interviewing with needs, then the recruiter tries to find you a different group within the company where your experience matches what the group needs. I really liked the recruiters that I worked with, although the last of the three that I spoke with was hard to get hold of sometimes.
VMware's process for interviewing developers with less than 2 or 3 years of experience was certainly better than at Google, whose process takes even longer, and where software developers don't interview to enter a specific team at Google, they just interview for Google. Unlike VMware, Google recruiters didn't seem to be able to know whether you were likely to get a job or not based on your interviews.