I had 5 stages to my process: - initial recruiter call - chat with some engineers - take home technical challenge - technical interview to go over my submission plus extra considerations - informal chat with the CTO All stages were conducted really well. The initial stages took a bit longer than expected but that was mostly due to the recruiter being ill so we had to push back our initial call. I was also passed on to a different department at Octopus/Kraken which added some time but I see this as a positive. Both recruiters (Jess and Josie) I dealt with were really attentive and took their time to understand my skills and what I was looking for in a new job and placed me in the department that would best match that. The technical parts of the process moved pretty quickly, the questions I was asked were all relevant to the level I was applying for and the interviews were genuinely friendly and conversational. I felt that the interviewers had my best interests at heart and wanted to give me the support I needed to showcase my abilities in the best light, no trick questions or waiting for me to slip up. I also loved how there were very few of those boring behavioural questions (tell me about a time you had a conflict with a coworker blah blah). After the final stage I received an offer the next day and was very happy to accept.

After a call with the recruiter, I was sent a technical test (which I was told would be followed by a technical interview if things went well). This is the same test they use across the entire group (as far as I could tell) and they haven't changed it in at least a couple of years. It asks candidates to write a Django application that implements a parser for a very industry-specific standard, which specification is, and this is written in the problem statement, fairly confusing to navigate and understand, and somewhat incomplete. You'll have a 3-4h time limit (they say not finishing by then will not be held against you - that's a lie, you'll be failed automatically), and at least a third of that will be just figuring out how to read the specification. In truth, a realistic expectation for finishing most of the test (i.e. only be missing some optimisations and a few tests) would be around 5-6h, so just ignore the time limit (everyone I know who've gone through this test does so). Then, even if your submission is more than good, once you've submitted it it's a coin toss. There's no indication what a passing grade even remotely looks like, and I've heard people being failed for a variety of reasons which most would consider nitpicks (rather than whole reasons for failing an application), such as too many comments, or missing something not mentioned in the problem statement's requirements. Feedback which amounts to "we were impressed at the submission but we found a small bug and you're missing a small bit of doc we didn't mention in the requirements" would be something I'd expect to mean the submission wasn't perfect but we can talk about it during the follow-up technical interview, but apparently that meant I was out. As a reminder, I wasn't even applying for a senior position. Honestly considering the feedback I'm almost glad I got rejected, considering how high the bar was for a non-senior position with the salary range I was told about during the initial interview (£50-70k). If the expectations are higher for non-senior devs than I've seen or experienced on senior devs in other places, then it feels like I've dodged a massive silver bullet.