Keep at it and try to distinguish what kind of culture the company has in the first call with the recruiter. Don’t even bother with a tech screen until you know that.
These are good places to start:
These are good places to start:
I’m actually a bit relieved to read this, a few weeks back a third-party recruiter submitted me to a pretty well paying Senior DevOps role at a massive fintech company. Their overview and write up of the role was pretty minimal, so I agreed to be submitted hoping to learn more.
The very first interaction from them was a no-reply@ email from HackerRank. I didn’t even know who the internal recruiter was, not even a “Hi my name is blah you, we got your resume from agency” email from a warm blooded human being. Straight to coding test.
If it weren’t for an email address in the HackerRank invitation to contact their recruiting team if the test failed to load or some other issue taking said test, I would have had no means of contacting them.
I sent a polite email thanking them for considering me, and that I’d be happy to help them assess my skills but only after learning more about the company, the team I’d be hired into and having at least a nice to meet you conversation.
They declined, I removed myself from consideration.
Wondered off and on if that was the right call, eventually got over it...but that practice just didn’t sit well with me at the time.
I do genuinely enjoy building things, just had a run of bad luck with my team at a FAANG being gutted and losing my job without a year under my belt. Algo was never a strong suit - still trying to figure out better ways to improve solely to make it through interviews.
Fortunately I can get interviews and make it through provisional screens. Most of my let downs have been in second round screens or on-sites.