I received an unsolicited email from a company recruiter. After making email contact and learning a few details about the job, we arranged for a telephone interview. During the telephone interview we had a candid discussion about what I could do for the company and how the company could help me grow in my career. I was left with the feeling that the interview went well. The next stage of the hiring process was to take an online skills test on standard C++. The test was very hard. It was full of questions with unusual and esoteric snippets of code that you were asked to analyze and state what the results would be. Even though I am a professional programmer with 15+ years experience using C, I totally bombed the test. I never heard back from them.