Choreograph interview questions

One of the most difficult, time-consuming, and quite frankly inconsiderate interview processes I’ve ever experienced, spanning what would have been 4–5 stages: an initial screening call, a CV/background discussion, a take home task, a task review interview, and a final cultural interview. There seemed to be a disconnect between the recruiter and the hiring team, with expectations communicated quite poorly throughout. The take home task was a data analysis project that required research, backend and frontend development, and a written analysis on a dataset I was given beforehand with no context and vague instructions. I wasn’t given any guidance on how long I was expected to spend on it either, but it ended up taking significantly more time than I anticipated and felt like a very unreasonable amount of work just for a take home. When it came to reviewing the task in the following interview, the team hadn’t looked at my code beforehand. I hadn’t been advised about what format to submit it in, which caused a slight delay, but even though I sent it the day before, it apparently hadn’t been shared with the interviewers. I also wasn’t informed that I would be expected to fully present my work until the interview was already in progress, which was frustrating and left me unprepared. Whilst most of the interviewers were friendly, the experience was disappointing. On top of an already complex task, I was asked a lot of challenging and probing questions, but one interviewer was also blatantly on their phone and turning their camera on and off throughout, which just felt unprofessional and distracting. I was ultimately rejected for not having enough data engineering experience, which I had been upfront about from the start, coming from a software background. I was initially under the impression that my background was what they were looking for, but that clearly wasn’t the case and their job description has since been changed. Very frustrating experience that has just felt like a waste of time on both sides.

Applied on company website and received an email from HR. Initial phone screen was about 30 mins. A week later I got an invite to participate in a technical test via Codility. The test would be 125 mins and four sections: Excel, Tableau, and SQL (multiple choice and query.) This came as a surprise, as the job description listed these as "nice to haves," not requirements. I have experience with Excel and some with SQL, but only familiarity with Tableau, and it wasn't listed on my resume. The recruiter wasn't able to give me more information about what would be covered on the test and I ultimately decided to withdraw. I might have proceeded if it had been open book or I'd known what specific skills were going to be covered (e.g., writing macros for Excel vs making graphs).