An in-house recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn. We had an introductory phone conversation.

I was given an impersonal, 10-question technical assessment on HackerRank, to be completed within 15 minutes. Technical assessments of this nature are complete crapshoots, as the types and breadth/depth of questions could be anything. I'm not implying this makes them unfair – they are what they are.

I say "impersonal" because it was an online, multiple-choice assessment. There was at least one question where, due to the wording, more than one answer was possible, but only one could be chosen. Half the questions were about outdated coding methods that I haven't used in a few years (because they have been outdated for at least a few years).

Chewy uses an algorithm to score the assessment, and there's no opportunity to discuss the questions with a real person, which you could do if given the technical assessment by a human.

It was my job to succeed according to Chewy's process. I did not. However, this kind of technical assessment won't necessarily identify potentially qualified candidates, only those who get lucky at multiple-choice questions or who are still using outdated coding methods.

A 10-question, multiple-choice HackerRank assessment.