I applied online. The process took 7 weeks. I interviewed at Pleo (Copenhagen, Capital Region) in Mar 2020
Interview
Well I had a pretty good chat initially with a person from people operations and that went quite nice.
Afterwards I was given the challenge which clearly states that it should be a 'single page application using a modern JS library/framework'. This usually means that I am free to use whichever technology I know best for the job and that it would be reviewed objectively. Out of the top 3 most popular JS frameworks I chose one of them, but not the one that pleo likes and is accustomed to it seems. If you give me the choice of making it with whatever framework I choose, don't give negative feedback that I didn't choose the one pleo wanted. On top of that, pleo also does not have someone that can actually say any kind of feedback other than 'looks like a solid angular project' for an angular project.
Second issue I am having is with the negative remark that the project was not visually pleasing enough. Just so it's clear, in the requirements it asks for 'A visually pleasing experience, you don’t have to be a designer but you must have put an effort into making this look good'. Even though I actually spent a good amount of time implementing animations, choosing the right colours, making it responsive, coordinating with a couple of designers on this one to make sure it is a visually pleasing experience which from my point of view should have been more than enough because I invested more into this to also impress, but apparently this was an interview for a Designer and a FE engineer and of course not good enough.
Bottom line is that I feel like my project was scored as not good enough mostly because I did it in Angular and we all know how much hate Angular gets from React people. SO for the future I highly recommend that you specify exactly what technology you want to have it done in, so there's no time wasted from any parties involved.
For anyone choosing to go with this challenge, please make an effort and implement your most complex of filters, state of the art pagination, E2E testing and whatnot because pleo is looking for a full on app that does everything, not just some proof of concepts that it shows you actually know what you are doing, but you didn't go the full mile because you felt like that is not what they are looking for. That is exactly what they are looking for and I also know that for the future.