One-sided and disrespectful of my time. I had a screening interview with a recruiter, and right after that he sent me a take-home coding test. It was supposedly part of the process, but in reality it was 4–5 hours of tedious, mostly irrelevant puzzle work. Not especially difficult, just the kind of thing designed to soak up time with edge cases and busywork. I completed it anyway. The instructions were minimal: add four collaborators to a private GitHub repo and submit it that way. Simple enough. So I did exactly that. Then… nothing. Weeks went by with no response. I figured they had decided to move on and, like a lot of companies, just couldn’t be bothered to communicate that. But when I checked the repo again, I noticed the collaborator invites had expired. Which means they never even accessed it. They never looked at the submission at all. That’s the part that really gets me. They were perfectly willing to assign a half-day coding exercise because it cost them nothing. It required no effort on their part, no investment, no real consideration, just send out a canned test and let candidates burn their time proving themselves. But when it came time for them to spend even a minute reviewing what they asked for, they couldn’t be bothered. That tells me everything I need to know. There were already red flags in this process, and the take-home assignment was one of them. I should have trusted that instinct and walked away earlier. A hiring process is supposed to be a two-way evaluation, but too often companies act like a candidate’s time is disposable while their own is precious. It isn’t just bad recruiting. It’s disrespectful. They specifically asked me to keep the repo private, and I did. But I’m not under contract, and I’m under no obligation to keep unpaid interview work locked away forever. Especially when they never even reviewed it. At this point, I’ll likely publish it. If a company wants candidates to invest hours of unpaid labor, the bare minimum they can do is show up and look at what they asked for. Instead, they showed me exactly how little they value other people’s time. And honestly, isn’t that the most useful result of the whole interview process?

First off, the recruiter I talked to was very nice and helpful during the first round phone screen. I proceeded to a behavioral interview after this which was with the Director of Engineering. A lot of questions about my experience and how it would apply at Kin. I felt I did well in this interview. I was also given a take home project where I was required to create a pretty small and easy application. I quickly finished it and solved all the requested features and wrote unit tests for my work. However, I ended up getting rejected from what sounds like solving the problem with too simple of a solution. From conversations about the role and work I'd be doing it didn't sound like it would be very complicated work that I'd be doing. However, from the code feedback and conversations it did seem like they were a place where custom solutions are valued more than just pre-existing ones. If you are somebody who likes to write their own libraries and tools, I think this might be who they are looking for.