| Usually the candidate pipeline is: 1. External recruiter shotguns out candidates to my team manager. Having been on the other side of this process myself, any vetting the external recruiter does is pretty minimal and purely behavioral. 2. Our manager passes around resumes to the team, and we collectively review them and give a thumbs up or down based on how subjectively we are impressed by it. 3. Manager assigns the more senior members of the team to conduct phone screens. Typically we throw some of the easiest of the easiest leetcode questions, or very simple "implement this in JS" questions. I personally have failed people at this stage mostly for communication or behavioral issues. 4. On-site. Combination of easy leetcode questions and "implement this in JS" questions. I can honestly, proudly, say that my team does not look for hyperoptimal perfect leetcode solutions - we genuinely focus on the communication process more. Part of the reason for this is, as I mentioned before, most of the candidates we get would struggle at all but the easiest leetcode questions and we cannot afford to be picky. We're not a hot tech company. We're a boring investment bank. Very, very rarely we get a candidate that has worked at a hot tech company - even a FAANG occasionally. Their candidacy gets treated like a celebrity. But so far all such candidates have been turned down by my manager's manager because "they don't have enough business (finance/trading) knowledge". Never mind that most of our current team has extremely little to no such business knowledge too. In any case I doubt we could match the level of compensation they might be wanting. |