Applied via internal referral. The recruiter contacted me promptly and set up a phone call. They asked many typical behavioral questions.

Next, they set up a take-home code review exercise. Several days after submitting it, I received an email stating that the team would not be proceeding.

Why my experience was negative: No feedback was given. The recruiter's email was ambiguous about the reasons for rejection.

My best assumption is that it was because of the code review challenge I submitted. The exercise emphasizes "empathy" for the code review, and I took a lot of extra time to optimize for that – making comments clear, polite, understandable, and simple, and researching and implementing best practices for code review. There was also an emphasis that not all bugs needed to be caught, which I again interpreted as them mainly evaluating my ability to be empathetic.

This leads me to think they have a very specific style of code review they are looking for. Why not offer a style guide with your code review exercise? It's not hard for people to learn how to calibrate or format their feedback according to guidelines.

Bottom line: This left a bad taste in my mouth.

To the recruiters: Give your candidates some feedback to help them understand. Whether they agree with that feedback or not is up to them. But it's always better to be transparent about how you evaluate your candidates.

Why do you want to work here?

Tell me about your experiences.

How do you see yourself growing in 5 years?

Review a pull request on GitHub.