This company is basically a contracting company. They take a share of the cut for interviewing candidates and finding talent, and then placing the qualified workers with partner employers they have relations with (and sometimes ones they barely know, in my experience).
What doesn't make sense is that the finder fee is not a one time fee, but 30% of the check that employer pays towards the employee. Like why would it be such exorbitant rate? I get that there is a one time finder's fee, but a longer term contract for four months and they pocket 30% could quickly add up, making the candidacy of a very expensive hire not appealing. It would be 1/3 of a engineer's salary that they pocket which doesn't make economical sense to the contractor or the contractee, And it doesn't hold up considering the little value they provided to both parties.
With the context of their above business model, the coding interview process makes it harder to understand. They made me create a card game from scratch for my interview take-home assignment. They provided the boilerplate code that seem to have not really been maintained for years. When the CICD ran, a test that broke it was one which references the "learn react" element. For context, I was interviewing for FE React engineer job. For any experienced engineer out there, the first thing one would do is remove that test from the CI CD pipeline, because it's an example for starting out a react project when pull in the react test library to their local development environment. It should not be kept as a test for the developer's own application. Either they were lazy to remove the example test, or they just didn't care. Just goes to show the minimum amount of effort to create the interviewing process.
Finally, I have to mention, when I reached out to follow up on the next steps, they said they messed up and that their client contractor did not trust their interviewing process! This was after 3 rounds of interviews already and 4 hours spent completing their take home. LOL, they said I would be referred to their client directly to be re-interviewed again if I wanted. Then they said they could reach out to their client, With the condition (AGAIN!) if I accept to raise the threshold my contract payment by 30% so they can get paid! Their reasoning is that they wasted their own time and they got nothing out of it. "Hello?", you don't know how to read your audience? Where is your basic business acumen.
1) You wasted your own time as result of your own disorganization. It's not my problem. Don't interview candidates for that client when they don't accept third party qualifying placement process. How did you build that client relation anyways? I have so many questions.
2) What about the time I wasted to do your take home assignment. 4-8 hours. They promised that the 4-8 hours is paid, BUT it's with condition attached, that ONLY when the candidate is hired and placed successfully. This a classic get-them-hooked-first scheme. For any person who has somewhat basic understanding of questionable business practices, this is just a strategy to get the candidate to apply to a company that appears to be trustworthy and friendly, then later retain plausible deniability of the original offer. Too bad for the loser candidate who is desperate for work.
Overall my impression is that this company is scamming good engineers and they prey on desperation and are not apologetic for it. They are in the business of taking the biggest cut from contractors, and the current employer market situation. They do the least amount of work they can get away with to find good candidates, in the process of which, they do not care about their long term reputation of screwing over their candidates or their clients.
DO NOT INTERVIEW WITH THEM!
