Recruiter chat, hiring manager, take home assessment that’s supposed to be “time boxed” for 2.5 hours, system design, and idk. Honestly what Zapier is looking for isn’t actual development chops, they want you to spew out as much AI slop as possible. The take home assessment isn’t actually realistically feasible in 2.5 hours unless you off load a majority of the work to Claude or whatever. You know, it’s actually fascinating when you think about it. You’re being graded not on actual thought, but just how fast you can pump out code. There’s no rhyme or reason, there’s no thinking about “is this maintainable? Is this going to impact reviews? Is the code going to be understood in 3/6/9 months?” I mean I guess it’s par for the course at Zapier, they’ve gone all in towards AI “development” because that’s what I guess software development is. But it’ll be interesting to see how they can handle when their stuff inevitably breaks.

The process started normally enough: a recruiter screen, then a call with the hiring manager. After that they sent a two-hour take-home assignment, followed by a review session with a few engineers. I put real effort into the take-home and felt good about it. I completed the assignment and also created a separate fork to explore some more advanced concepts. The review itself went well. One of the engineers and I clicked, and at the end they even gave me their email and encouraged me to reach out if I had follow-up questions. That left me with the impression that things were moving forward. Then everything went quiet. Weeks passed with no updates. I reached out to HR for an update and when they finally replied, the explanation was vague and didn’t align with any of the feedback I’d received during the process. After that, I looked more closely at Glassdoor and noticed a pattern: candidates describing similar interview loops that ended in “not offered.” That’s when it hit me that I’d likely spent a significant amount of time and energy on a process that was never going anywhere. Unfortunately, Zapier is in an era where they get in their own way, with an extremely poor hiring rate. It’s not because they are not interviewing first-class candidates, it’s because their over-regulated process does not allow them to successfully recognize that they are. This over complicated calibration leads to a tiny, if not non-existent, window for success. As an engineer working for Zapier and required to interview dozens of valid candidates without hiring them, I would be extremely frustrated. Now as a candidate I check companies on glass door and if all the recent interviews say “not offered” I don’t waste my time.