First stage is a written technical test they would send you by email with 13 questions and you have to submit it back at your earliest convenience.
I found the test approachable in general, although I had to look a few things up on the web just to refresh my mind, particularly around the topic of multi-threading, which featured heavily on the test, and I end up learning a couple of things too along the way, so not a total waste of time then.
I ended up passing the test and I was invited to an interview at their offices to do another technical test there. I was advised that the test would be heavily around SQL schema and it would involve using old ADO dot Net db access exclusively, although this was not representative of their stack. ???
So this time the exercise was to sit you down with a laptop and develop a front-end web application in 90 minutes that would need to display 6 different sets of data from the database (some of then related as in Master-Detail, etc) - they would provide user credentials to access the required database, Visual Studio and SQL Server Management Studio. Also they would give you the relevant fields to be displayed for each data set required. In return they would ask you to provide a well structured and architecture application (adhering to all good standards and principles as much as possible) that must compile and must work at the end of the test as bare minimum and ideally should present all 6 data sets required.
The curved balls in here were also that you must only use ADO dot Net (so no O R M systems at all), Stored Procedures where not allowed either and finally you were NOT allowed to use the internet either to look up anything other than the structure of a connection string to the database.
Based on the recruiter's description of the test, I was expecting much more on the SQL Server side and much less on the application side, so it got me a bit off guard. Thankfully I had already practiced a bit the connectivity side and the D A L and D A O patterns of old to get around this, but in the end I just managed to complete fully the first part of the test.
Nevertheless I was happy with the way I had structured and architecture my solution, and all the remaining parts could be done just by making use of all that I had implemented to get the first of the six answers working fine in exactly the similar way. So after the end of the exercise I thought that could be enough. Obviously the project also compiled and worked fine up to the end of the first question (first data set displayed.)
After the exercise I was told that they would invite me back again for a face to face interview if I would pass the test.
A few days later, the recruiter told me that unfortunately I didn't finish enough of the exercise and that they were not offering me a further interview and that was the end of the road for me.
