Very unprofessional interview process.
Things started out fine. A standard phone chat with the recruiter, then a chat with the hiring manager. Both went well for me.
The next step was a take-home coding exercise. The exercise itself was not too difficult, but trying to send my solution to the recruiter and get feedback from the team on next steps is where things went seriously downhill.
The recruiter was not able to open the codesandbox link I sent her, which was confusing, because the link I sent was accurate. I tried all the other links I could find on codesandbox and sent those as well.
We had a back and forth over a few days. Recruiter kept saying she still couldn't open the link, then finally said she thinks she got it, but that I had done the wrong exercise. She proceeded to explain that I was supposed to do the exercise that I actually did.
Very confused, I sent her a screenshot of the codesandbox landing page and attached the original PDF of the prompt asking her to verify that I did the right exercise. I also put the code into a zip file project and sent her a link to my personal Drive account. She responded simply that she (or the team?) couldn't figure out how to get the files into codesandbox.
Exasperated, but remaining calm and polite on our email thread, I suggested we try jumping on a phone call to sort things out together. No response. So I called her phone number and left a voicemail. Still no response.
A day later, she sent me an email message through JobVite that the team was moving forward with other candidates.
Unbelievable. Very frustrating to put hours of unpaid time into a take home assessment for a company and go through this experience, not knowing for sure if they even saw the right codesandbox that I completed.