Recently I had written a post about cold rejections, and just after it, I got one more reject, but it was really mindful, constructive and just the thing which can help me(any applicant) convert rejects into an offer.

I had applied for python developer position at Scrapinghub, before applying I liked that open source projects were very core to their business and products, whole team worked remotely, and I wanted to learn/work more on extracting content from web pages and how it is evolving, from static HTML pages to dynamically loaded content using frontend frameworks(for a possible next iteration of SoFee). My application email did work and I got shortlisted for next round of trial project.

I was given a project, task was well defined, along with the expected output, and accompanying instructions were very clear and helpful. As I rushed to followup and submit first working code, they gave me more time to debug, improve and iron out things. This is where I missed/made mistake, I think, I debugged the code, tested that it worked, wrote few test cases and confirmed that output I got was what they expected and followed up with them. They took couple of days to go over my submission, results and the code and followed up with a rejection and feedback on where I went wrong: With this background, after exploring open positions at ScrapingHub, opportunities in field of text classification and information retrieval embedded in WebPages, I am really excited by the prospects. after exploring open positions at ScrapingHub, opportunities in field of text classification and information retrieval embedded in WebPages, I am really excited by the prospects.

Simple parsing tasks are better handled using regular expressions. The reviewers found the code complicated and lacking in Python idioms when compared to other solutions that solve the same task.

As I mentioned earlier, I missed on cleaning up my code, optimizing it and instead I rushed to submit. This feedback is really helpful and I know where I have to work more and improve. Not just that, even working on the task was a learning experience for me. All in all, while it was saddening that I didn't make it, the process was really constructive and I hope others too will shift to similar methods for their recruitment.