I applied through a recruiter. The process took six weeks.

• HR wrote on WhatsApp and set up a phone call to tell me about the company and the position.
• In a day, there was a video interview with the team leader. He said that for this position they have chatbots, a client conversation app or platform, and a recommendation platform. The next steps were a homework assignment, system design, and something else.
• In three days, I received a home assignment. The citation from the task was: "This assignment is designed to showcase your ability to think about and implement effective LLM conversations, rather than focusing on documentation or complex backend systems."
• In four days, I returned the home assignment. The citation from the task regarding what to prioritize was: "1. Conversation Quality: Focus on making the interactions feel natural and helpful. 2. Prompt Design: Show your skill in crafting effective prompts that get the best results. 3. Error Handling: Demonstrate how you recover from confused responses or hallucinations. 4. Context Management: Show how you maintain conversation history and context."
• In another four weeks, there was nothing from them. I even wrote to HR a check-in email on the third week after the home assignment was sent, and she assured me that I needed to wait more.
• On the fifth week, the HR called me with a rejection. The reason was that the prompt engineering part was done very, very well, but there was too simple of an architecture, like a POC not like a prod level, and there weren't any tests done.

I am absolutely confused because the rejection reason was based on what wasn't in the evaluation part, and it was written in the home assignment in black and white that these things are not taken into account during evaluation.