i originally applied online, but after weeks never received any response. then i asked a friend working at hello fresh for a referral and 24 hours later the recruiter had contacted me. which is...interesting. we then scheduled a call, which was mostly about my cv and motivation as well as me being able to ask some questions. next step was a coding task on the hackerrank platform. the task was to classify movies, based on mostly text data into 2 categories. surprisingly, there was 4 hour time limit to complete the task, which in my experience would have taken at least 6 hours to finish if an actually good result was desired and the code was supposed to be commented and annotated. from previous experience, companies usually only give hard time limits for generic coding tests like codility, but not for specific use cases like this. i then received the message that they do not want to proceed, the feedback being "insufficient technical skill". when i asked them to elaborate, the recruiter told me she was gonna get feedback from "the team". then the recruiter said that the reason for them declining me was not my lack of technical skill but simply that i had not finished in time, which was confusing. my request to speak with someone who assessed my task was declined with no reason. all in all, the application process was negative. first, my online application was ignored. then after spending 4 unpaid hours on a task, very little and confusing feedback was provided. and when asking to speak with a data person, they refused. in all fairness i must say that the recruiter was very friendly and responsive, which i cannot say about the data team at hello fresh. given the average at best pay and low number of paid days off, i think i would have eventually declined the position as the company culture does not value the efforts of individuals, while asking for a lot.

It was one of the most bizarre interview experience in my entire career. First, the HR seemed nice and knowing what he was doing. However, he ghosted me later when I asked for clarification about their egregious take-home assignment and feedback. I don't know whether their team was just hype enthusiast and had no real idea how analysis and model were actually developed in real work to put up such project and coming from nowhere criteria. Simply put interview at your own risk.