I was contacted by a recruiter looking for recent college graduates. I sent my resume to the recruiter, and soon had a technical phone interview set up for two weeks later.

The recruiter sent me a couple of documents with information on how to prepare, but they were very broad and not exceptionally helpful. (Perhaps they are more helpful for on-site interviews.)

My phone interview was 45 minutes long and consisted only of three coding questions, for which I had to provide solutions in a shared Google Doc. The questions were a little out of the blue for me, and since this was my first technical interview, I was largely unprepared.

I highly encourage working on coding challenges, like those on TopCoder or CodeChef, in order to prepare. My interview didn't involve problems that use "standard" algorithms and techniques (I didn't need to code up a quicksort or Dijkstra's, or use dynamic programming, etc.), so it's good to have preparation in a diverse mix of problems.

The recruiter called two days after the interview to say that they were not going to move forward.