TL;DR if they tell you that you have to go through Karat then use it for practice and keep looking elsewhere. Recruiter reached out to me and then asked me to schedule interviews with Karat (which I’ll talk about in a minute). They mentioned that you’d get one retry as well. I did this and after the first interview with Karat, scheduled a retry because I felt like I didn’t perform as well I could have. I don’t hear back from the recruiter who finally messages me back and says that my phone screen didn’t go through but would I like to do another one! Overall, this was an awful interviewing experience! As a senior engineering candidate I didn’t even get a chance to speak to an engineer from Compass. Now onto my Karat experience. The first interviewer I had robotically read out some instructions then copy-pasted the question. There was 0 interaction during the interviewing process. It felt like doing a take home problem while you were being watched. I had a small bug in my program so didn’t finish it (entirely my fault). The second interviewer was great! Explained very clearly that the point of the coding challenge was to finish it and not optimise it. Karat is honestly an awful, hit or miss experience. Interviews are very much two way experiences and I don’t see the point in talking to an engineer who doesn’t even work at the company. I understand that not all companies have the luxury of asking their engineers to interview but it does make me question whether I want to work for them. It’s very good if you’re looking for practice interviews though!