I applied through a university board posting. I had no expectations. I was treating it as interview practice. I did not receive any type of notice regarding the status of my application or request to book an interview. Instead, the recruiter called me out of the blue during work hours and tried to interview me on the spot (months after I applied). I politely declined as I was about to go into a meeting. We end up rescheduling. This was a pattern throughout the entire process. I would be told to do X, Y and Z with an arbitrary time crunch. Then a few weeks later I would get a call informing me of the result and asked to complete another task on the spot. Recruiter was reluctant to provide details about future stages for some reason. The reason they provided ("unfair advantage") was terrible. Tbh, it sounded like they weren't prepared and chose not to say anything. They could have easily said something vague like a "data analysis project" and they would not have given anything away. There were several stages. First was a screener. Basically to see if they can afford you and if you would be okay with working at their office (tone of recruiter implied no flexibility whatsoever). Then you had to do a 45min technical test which was basically a bunch of random trivia questions about math, stats and programming and a couple of coding questions. Many of which were wrong btw. Then you had to do a ridiculous take home assignment that you had to complete in 2 hours (time starts when recruiter emails you the data set). Basically you were emailed a raw dataset with a problem scenario, and you were expected to analyze the data and provide a model. The problem was that you were provided 0 context whatsoever and the data dictionary was useless. I've done take homes where you're supposed to figure things out for yourself, but this was not that. It was a poorly conceived take home. The cherry on top was that on top of the analysis and model building, you were expected to create presentation ready slides to present to a roundtable documenting the entire process. The second part of the take home assignment asked you to create an entire end to end ml arch (data, tools, model, training, deployment, validation, maintenance, pipeline, workflow etc) as well as an entire project lifecycle proposal (budget, resources, risk, stakeholders etc the whole shebang). The greatest part about all of this was that the recruiter kept you in the dark prior to all of this because they didn't want to give anything away. You were just expected to have the right applications installed and ready to go. This was problematic because this was heavily advertised as a python/R data science position, but the assignment was skewed to favour BI tools (ex. PowerBI). I assume they were opaque about their needs to attract more candidates (or the test reflected the technical skillset of the manager). They also reassured me that it wouldn't take a long time and it was something I could complete very quickly during work hours if I knew what I was doing. Almost felt like they were making candidates do their work for them. I chose to exit the process at this stage. Then after all this, you were supposed to present your solution to a roundtable. After the presentation they would ask you follow up technical questions. I did not partake. Overall a terrible experience and a gigantic waste of time. Please give candidates more flexibility for scheduling and advance notice for interviews/assessments. Also reconsider the take home. It was obvious you spent very little time creating it. The assignment was not technically challenging. Trying to raise the technical bar, by making it more convoluted and arbitrarily making it more tedious, is not going to net you better candidates. I'm not surprised you're still struggling to fill this position year after year.