I applied to a job offer on LinkedIn for a Backend Lead position. Arter a few days I had a call with a recruiter who asked some questions to validate experience, salary expectations and then explained what the process would be like. Since I was in other interview processes they suggested having a 1h live coding exercise with a technical person. On that day three people showed up in the interview. Apparently one of them was shadowing the others. They started introducing themselves and quickly moved on to sharing the problem with me. I had to stop them so I could briefly introduce myself. Found that very rude. I am an experienced interviewer and that already put me off. No ice breaker, no agenda. The problem was presented to me in the shape of a zip file. I was asked to share my screen with them since we were on a videocall. “yeah, well, this is a very easy exercise about a cache system. Won’t take us very long”, they said. Of course it was easy for them considering they have solved so many times and know all the possible ways in which it can go wrong, but not a candidate that has just seen the problem for the first time and did not even have time nor the chance to read it. They started to explain the problem without even letting me read it first. Had to ask for lots of clarifications since I felt that I wasn’t allowed to read the problem statement. Why do they share it then? After a candidate understands the goal of the problem they take some time to think of the data structures needed, the algorithm and their costs. Unfortunately they did not appreciate that I was in silence for a minute trying to make up my mind and were constantly asking for validation and communication, although I shared with them that intention. I couldn’t even think of how to tackle the problem with so many requests coming from 3 people! Obviously I couldn’t finish it. I felt so pressured and upset for how bad the interview was going that I got blocked. After hanging up and reading the problem description, I solved it in less than five minutes. It felt like a very chaotic interview in which they did not let me shine and show my full potential. They seemed like very inexperienced interviewers that showed zero empathy for me. If that is the common denominator in aircall, then I would rather not work for that company. I gave this very same feedback to the recruiter and never heard from her again, so I decided to post it here. Hope this review helps other people.

I was first contacted by a recruiter on Linkedin. I had a short phone call with her, followed by a video call with a manager a week later. The last stage of the interview, the technical one, took place 1 week later, it was a role-play scenario.