I applied online, after about 2 weeks a recruiter responded to schedule a VC call. The conversation went well but it felt a bit strange because the recruiter did not wish to turn the camera on, which is usually how companies speak to candidates. The recruiter answered my questions and presented the role, but I was left a bit to feel like I don't know what will happen next. He told me that he will take more time to speak to more candidates and then decide who to progress to the next stage. After about 2 weeks the recruiter came back to tell me I progressed to the next stage, Depth of Expertise interview. This was an interview where you are asked to present your experience with focus on a specific challenging project. The interviewer also asks you various questions related to the project or things you are maybe expected to know based on your CV and the job description. I felt the interview went well, but I did not get a response for about 3 more weeks when I got a random call from the recruiter that I missed. He also sent me an email after and we were able to connect. I was then told that I had passed the interview and will be progressed to the next stage, a Take-Home project. This was asking you to build a system which uses public Starling Bank APIs. The task is described well and they show you how to set up a developer account and generate testing data. They tell you this task should take you about 4-6 hours, but they give you about a week to submit, so you can pick when to work on it. I felt solution I submitted was good, but after another 2-3 weeks of waiting for a response I was told that some of the things were not as they expected, I was given a couple of lines of feedback, quoting decisions I actually made like that on purpose as bugs. It felt like these things can be a lot hit and miss, but I can understand they possibly want something specific that maybe you are used to doing differently. Overall, I did not progress to the next stage, which would have been a call to discuss the solution. After that I believe there was only a Hiring Manager call left. Due to the amount that you are maybe expected to do for the task, and in 4-6 hours, I would say the interview is not easy. I literally started at 9am and finished the same day around 10pm and felt exhausted, but maybe I ended up doing a lot things to make it a full production ready app which were not taken into account when they were looking for something specific. Hard to tell what the expectations were based on the feedback. The big negatives to the process were the very long waiting time where you feel you are in limbo.
Summary of process:
1st stage recruiter - present your experience and find alignment with role; 2nd stage engineer - present experience and talk about project + answer technical questions
3rd stage take-home project - something based on Starling public APIs which you submit then an engineer reviews
next stages - call to discuss solution and hiring manager, possibly also a system design.
