I was contacted by a recruiter, who scheduled a technical phone screening to take place the following week. The recruiter emailed me some materials, mostly links to videos and websites, which she suggested I review.

I felt very comfortable before the phone interview because I regularly solve coding problems and interview questions on sites like HackerRank, LeetCode, and Codewars. I also spent about 4 hours each day preparing for the interview during the last few days.

I was expecting the interview question to be moderately difficult with multiple steps. I was surprised at how particularly specific and trivial the question was. The interviewer worded the question in an obscure way, and it took me several minutes and several questions to figure out what exactly was being asked.

I answered the question correctly, discussed the performance implications, and some edge cases. The interview concluded, and after about two days, the recruiter contacted me to say the interviewer did not feel I was qualified to move forward in the process, and I was eliminated.

The part I found most frustrating is that while I believe I'm a strong enough candidate to warrant a real interview, I was turned down after a single phone screen question that I answered correctly. Worse still, the recruiter informed me I cannot reapply to Google for a year.

I don't understand why I was rejected after answering a poorly constructed question correctly. The recruiter likely doesn't know either, because when I asked that question in my last email, I never received a response.

Write a function that searches the Document Object Model for some text and returns the node that contains the search term.

(I'm paraphrasing.)

The actual question took three minutes to ask in an awkward, convoluted way.