I applied to Awardco on their career site on May 31, 2025. Jun 2 I received an invite to do a coding assessment through Coderbyte. It was timed for 2.5 hrs and took me about 2, but I spent additional hrs learning about Coderbyte and practicing. There were two leetcode type questions of easy to normal difficulty, and about 4 other multiple choice and written response questions. You couldn't leave the browser window during the assessment, but you could use a kind of iframed google search that was somewhat janky and excluded many results it presented, like anything from stackoverflow. I completed that assessment on Jun 3 and received another email about a one-sided video interview through Sparkhire on Jun 5. I spent several hours prepping for this and completed it the next day in about 1 hr. It consisted of 8 questions, mostly culture fit and other fairly average recruiter type questions, including my salary expectations and commuting to the location. The video interview had a due date a week out, but I didn't receive any further notice until a potentially completely automatic and generic rejection email 14 days later, today on Jun 20. It primarily mentioned that they went with other candidates.
At no point did I talk to a human representative from the company nor was I even given a clear contact I could reach out to. (I tried to reach out to one recruiter on linkedin about 9 days after I submitted the recorded video interview, but received no response).
Not only did I invest a lot of time into this process without knowing if a single human ever actually considered anything that I did, I also have no significant feedback about any of it. I felt like I did pretty well in the coding assessment and video interview, which only makes it worse in my view. I can't really say this company did anything wrong or deceptive, but these new hiring processes that ostensibly make it so much better for the hiring company, simultaneously make it incredibly stacked against the candidate. It is often said that a job interview goes both ways, and you should make sure to assess that the company is a good fit for you as they are doing the same. There is essentially 0 opportunity for that despite a minimum of 4 hrs of my time, and many more if you include my voluntary prep. So if this is anything approaching the 'new normal' for hiring, that seems incredibly unfortunate. And FWIW, if it does continue in this direction, I imagine that good job candidates will begin to filter themselves out of consideration from the get go because it simply isn't worth the enormous time investment while risking getting nothing in return.
