Full Stack engineer interview process at QuickReply.ai: Spent 2 Days on a take home and Never Heard Back
I’m not sure if this is the right place to post this, but I wanted to share my interview experience with QuickReply.ai because it was genuinely a disaster, and I hope it helps others going through a similar experience.
The first round was an AI interview round,. I spent a day preparing for the AI interview round and it was basic system design concepts. After this, I got an email from the HR(alekhya) that I got shortlisted and must submit a Full stack application which involved building a research paper tracker application with DB integration, analytics, filters, charts, etc.
Before starting, I emailed the HR team with a simple clarification question regarding whether I could use Next.js backend routes/server actions instead of a separate Node/Express backend. I never received a reply to that question. Should've stopped there since a simple question like that and no reply from HR is kind of a red flag for me but I wasn't having luck with interviews and shortlists are rare to come by, I decided to proceed anyways.
Completed the assignment within the deadline, deployed the project, shared the GitHub repository, deployment link, and even added their GitHub account as a collaborator as requested.
The response I got from HR after submission : "Acknowledged."
No feedback.
No timeline.
Not even a generic “we’ll get back to you.”
After that, I followed up around 6 times over the next 3 weeks trying to check the status politely, and was completely ghosted every single time. I spent a good 10 hours on the assignment and preparing for the ai round and put a good amount of effort polishing the app, even went beyond the scope and added authentication and didn't even get a line of feedback.
It reflects extremely poor on their hiring process leaving a candidate hanging after taking the free assignment work. The conversation with HR throughout the process felt very unprofessional and doesn't have the basic courtsey to reply properly. It felt like I was chatting with a toddler with one word replies. I'm leaving this review just so you guys can avoid going through the same experience.