Nearly 3 years of MERN experience, 30+ interviews in 4 months, consistently reaching later rounds but no offers. What am I missing?
I have around 3 years of full-stack development experience (MERN/PERN), and over the past 4 months I've attended nearly 30 interviews.
The good part is that I've improved a lot. My communication is much better than it used to be, and I can confidently answer most technical questions. I've reached the later rounds in several interview processes (almost 8), but I keep getting rejected in the final stages with either generic feedback or no feedback at all.
Recently, I interviewed with a startup that's building LLM-based products and training its own in-house models. I made it to the final round, where we discussed the architecture of my previous company's product, the features I designed, deployment, CI/CD, scalability, business impact, and technical decisions. The final round was mostly behavioral, and I felt it went well. I left the interview feeling confident, but I never heard back.
What confuses me is that this wasn't my experience in 2024 or early 2025. Back then, I got multiple offers without putting in anywhere near this much effort.
Most of the roles I'm interviewing for ask for 3+ or 4+ years of experience, so maybe I'm simply losing out to candidates with a bit more experience. But I'm not sure.
I'd love to hear from people who've been involved in hiring or have seen the current market from the other side.
- Is it common to keep interviewing candidates even after there's already a preferred candidate?
- Why do candidates who perform well throughout the interview process still get rejected in the final round?
- Has the market really become this much more competitive over the last year, or is there something I'm overlooking?
I'd really appreciate any honest advice. I'm genuinely trying to improve, but after months of interviewing, it's becoming difficult to understand what I'm missing.