We understand it is disappointing to be given bad news during an interview process. As with all our candidates, we called this candidate upon marking his test to discuss the feedback and arrange a call with a member of the team to discuss / debate the proposed solution. There are numerous ways the test could have been completed and we have hired people who have taken a multitude of different approaches. Unfortunately, upon the first suggestion that one of the exercises had not been completed as per the instructions, the candidate became agitated and accused our Engineer of not understanding the test he had written, or AWS. He didn’t want to listen to the complete feedback or have a meeting with the team to discuss the results. Separately, in an email thread instigated by us to provide context on where he had fallen short in his approach, we responded to his specific technical points, describing what we expected to see from candidates compared to his submission and referring him to the relevant online documentation. For clarity: The candidate completed only half of the instructions in exercise one. He did then go on to create the functionality asked for in exercise one but committed it as part of exercise two. As we made clear on the phone and subsequently on email, we didn't mark that omission against their AWS knowledge and were happy to put it down to either an oversight, or a slip of which files were included in which git commits. However, the instructions were not followed, and the exercise not answered as requested. In exercise two, the solution provided by the candidate did not provide the outcome we had requested. We pointed out why very clearly, sharing code and documentation to show where he should have taken a slightly different course. Again, we were happy to allow that the obvious error may have been an oversight, but unfortunately we were not able to have a conversation to establish whether this was the case, or if was a genuine mistake. The member of staff assessing this candidates work has reviewed over 60 such tests and many candidates have successfully been recruited. Without wishing to post specifics of the submission here, we are confident that the assessment in this case was correct. We have again offered a further conversation to clarify any areas of concern, but have thus far not been taken up on our offer.