Had a good phone conversation with the first recruiter and was moved into the second stage which involved a one hour video call + sourcing session with another member of the team via a shared screen. I've done sourcing/recruiting challenges for other companies so this wasn't new to me. But what WAS new was the way it was conducted. The recruiter gave me a real JD the company was recruiting for, and said she'll be observing how I create search strings + my general sourcing strategy. After finding a few promising candidates, I was asked to explain what I liked about their background and why I would want to message them. Then, I was instructed to draft an outreach message from scratch. She also watched me do this live (which made me feel pretty uncomfortable). Then she asked me what kind of questions I would ask the candidate during a phone interview. At the end of the session, the recruiter had me copy and paste my outreach message into the zoom chat window so she and the team could review it. It wasn't really a collaborative session and the interviewer was pretty cold to me like they didn't even seem to want to be there. A few days later the team sent me a generic rejection message. All in all, it was such a strange experience. I get that recruiting may have tried to implement something similar to a technical coderpad screen to evaluate my sourcing abilities, but applying this method to recruiting professionals is heavily flawed. Other companies do take home assignments or will allow candidates some privacy as they source which is an accurate representation of what a recruiting professional would do for their normal day to day. For a company that has such an awesome product, I was sorely disappointed by the interview experience. If you're going to ask candidates to do actual 'work' for you, then at least provide them with feedback as to why they didn't move through the interview process instead of sending a canned response. Be mindful and considerate of your candidate's time.