I was contacted by a recruiter via LinkedIn. They set everything up really quickly, without any coding test, unlike what other reviews mentioned. This might have been because my background matched their requirements.

A phone interview followed a week later, which was pretty easy for me. The interviewer confirmed my solutions were correct and efficient, as expected, since I always try to optimize time complexity. I thought I was ready for the onsite.

However, a few days later, they briefly sent me an email saying that my skills and experience did not align with the role as well as other candidates.

This totally didn't make sense to me. After just one phone call, how could they determine if a candidate was skillful and experienced enough for the position, especially if the questions asked weren't related to the job description? If they thought so, why would they contact me in the first place? It was a waste of time for both parties.

I'm not writing this against Zillow, but please change your process or at least carefully review a candidate's background more thoroughly. For your information, my skills matched all their requirements.

The questions were super easy, asking for writing efficient code related to arrays.