After submitting my resume and before speaking with anyone at the company (including HR), I was asked to complete a take-home assignment. This was my first foray into take-home assessments and I now refuse to do them until I've at least spoken with a live-person over the phone. To me, it is incredibly disrespectful to ask the applicant to spend valuable time outside of work unless that applicant is at the last stage of consideration for the role. Furthermore, the assignment itself suspiciously lacked data science questions and instead focused on relatively simple data cleaning, a few joins, some descriptive statistics and minor data analysis. After submitting the assignment, I was invited to a preliminary interview with one “data insight” team member. When the interview started, I was surprised to discover that I was being interviewed by two folks instead of one, both of whom seemed to be a few years out of undergrad. I am not sure why Flatiron chose to have junior team members conduct interviews for a senior position and I was surprised that I never met with more senior team members throughout the whole interview process. At the start my interview, one of the team members introduced themselves and then abruptly announced that they would be turning off their camera for the rest of the interview. Luckily, the other interviewer was engaging, and we talked about my academic and professional history for 25 minutes. I was excited to discuss my five years of DS experience, including a variety of ML models that I have created (some of which have been published in medical journals and others that are in production at my current healthcare analytics company). The next step of the interview was 10 minutes of live coding. When the task was revealed, I was a bit surprised as it seemed to be a repeat of the take-home assignment and was not focused on data science questions. Instead, it was a very basic set of joins and summaries that any entry-level applicant should be able to perform. Before I could get familiar with three new data sets (enough to effectively write my code), one of the interviewers kept pointing out minor issues. It seemed that they did not know how to ascertain more advanced skills nor were they curious enough to learn more about my thought process. Next, they briefly presented a business consulting scenario around a restaurant recommendation app, which we only had 5 minutes to discuss. There was no back and forth and it seemed that they were looking for very specific answers to open-ended questions. I was allowed to use the last 10 minutes to ask questions about the culture at Flatiron, and I was impressed with their answers. Although there seemed to be a disconnect between what I experienced and what they told me about the company. After the interview, I asked HR for contact information so I could send thank you emails, but I never received a response. In fact, I never received a response to any of the three emails that I sent to my HR recruiter (even early emails with questions about scheduling and the take-home assignment). About a week after my interview, I reached out to HR to inquire about next steps. I thought surely I would have to speak with more senior folks before they could make a decision. About an hour later I received an automated rejection email. I was disappointed that at no point did I get a chance to speak with a data scientist about data science, nor did anyone review the take-home assignment that I had submitted. I had heard great things about this company (their former chief medical officer and I have published papers with the same colleagues), but ultimately their recruitment process seemed to be frustratingly biased against skill and experience.