I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Policy Expert (London, England)
Interview
Phone call with internal recruiter, followed by pair programming exercise on video call with tech lead and engineer. The pairing exercise was mandatory was no option for a take-home tech test instead. I found working with unfamiliar tools and technology, with two people I don't know watching, extremely difficult and I definitely came across as totally useless in the interview. They say 'just do what you normally do' but obviously there's no time to spend time reading and researching before getting started like you would in real life or with a take home test. I would strongly suggest having the option of a take-home test in future. The tech lead also surprised me with some formal interview style questions like 'what's your biggest weakness?' which I totally wasn't expecting based on what the recruiter had told me and kind of threw me off quite a lot. The tech lead also said that he would expect significantly more time in the office than the recruiter had said in the initial call. After the interview the recruiter used a cop-out 'we won't be able to offer the compensation you asked for' justification rather than providing any real feedback or simply saying 'sorry you weren't selected'. This caused confusion because I had mentioned my pay was negotiable, so I didn't know if it was worth continuing the discussion or this was just a lazy way of saying it's a no. I guess it was the latter, because the recruiter never replied to my follow-up question, which I found quite disappointing having spent the time to interview with them. Things were a bit disorganised, it seemed like they hadn't hired many frontend engineers before.
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As a business we strive to give all candidates a positive experience regardless of the outcome and would be keen to better understand your experience. Please do reach out to us on careers@policyexpert.co.uk if you would like to discuss this further.