Received an invite for a hacker rank assessment test from the recruiter but the recruiter didn't setup a phone call beforehand. I emailed her just to get a better understanding what will be asked in the assessment before starting it and asked if it's more on front end skills like react or data structure/algorithm type of questions or a combination of both. I was told that it would be on react only. So knowing i'm pretty ok with react, I took the assessment almost immediately, but it turns out there were 2 questions, one on react and one on ds/algo. I managed to complete the react questions correctly and fairly quickly and completed the algo/ds question but with some test cases failing because it was not optimal in runtime but ran out of time looking for an optimal solution. That question I would say it's not trivial and medium in difficulty. If I had known there would be a question in algo/ds, I probably would've took some time to prep since I'm pretty rusty in that area. I got a rejection email shortly after saying they are not moving on because of how my score was on the test. Her email made it sound like I completely failed on all the questions even though I knew I passed one question and had a pretty decent solution to the second one even though not optimal. I emailed the recruiter back saying that I was given the wrong info on what to prepare for. She then told me she has no knowledge of what the assessment would be about from hacker rank and I should've contact her when I started the test to let her know it was on ds/algo also. But seeing how the test is timed, I didn't really have time to do the test and contact her. The recruiter should've told me the first time about not knowing what the test is about instead telling me it's just on react. But it seems like there's a big reliance on hacker rank and they get the result on pass or no pass only if you complete all the questions with an optimal runtime. You pretty much cannot start with a first solution and then work your way back for a more optimal one because there is no time in the assessment for you to backtrack.

Had an initial call with a recruiter, which went well and made me excited about the role. The recruiter informed me that the next step was a technical screen and would involve DS&A. I asked if it would be Leetcode style, and he said yes. I spent the next 5 days grinding LC in preparation for the technical interview. However, the interview turned out to not be LC style at all - it was more of a pop quiz interview about front-end terms that I had to define verbally. Then it was followed by a technical deep dive into a recent project. I was taken aback and unprepared - if I had known the interview was going to be a tech deep dive, I would've spent time prepping the ins and outs of an interesting project I had worked on. Instead, I had to try and remember small technical details on the spot. I still thought it went OK. The recruiter reached out to me after the interview to let me know I would hear back in a day or two. I let him know that the interview wasn't DS&A, it was actually a tech deep dive. The recruiter didn't even bother to respond, and I never heard back from him again.