Initially I had a phone call with the HR about 1.5 hour. The HR seems have very few experience. She doesn't know anything about technology. When I introduce myself to tell her about my skillset (those are listed in the JD), she had zero idea about what I am talking and asked me not to say the technical terms. When I introduced the projects I've done, she kept asking "what is the purpose of the project?". I explained that was to resolve some technical problem, it's part of the product itself and told more about the product features. She still couldn't understand. Finally she gave me some suggestion about how can I introduce myself better and some potential improvements on my resume, which don't make sense to me. The HR is a nice person but lack of preparation and professional experience. She even started the conversation with: "I felt quite sleepy today...". After the initial conversation with the HR, I did pass and move to the next stage. The process of the hiring is: Technical Phone Screen -> Coding Session -> System Design & Behavioral Interview I only joined the "Technical Phone Screen" session and failed at this stage. There was a Chinese developer asked me some question. And we started a live coding. I asked why the "technical screening" is a coding test, shouldn't be at the next stage? And the told me the "technical screening is a coding test". The coding test was using a third-party platform. The interviewer and interviewee can both modify and view the live changes of the code board. The code board was set to Javascript. As my applied role was a backend engineer, both me and the interviewer tried to change the board to use Python but can't find any way to do it. My coding test was conducted in Python and given 30 mins to write a solution for a leetcode-like question. I finished in 15 mins and I've proved my solution worked with the given test cases. After the "Technical Phone Screen" session. I got an rejection email. I tried to reach out the HR by email. As I think I was performing well on the interviews. I would like to gather some feedback. But I didn't get any response ever since.

The first two stages took less than a week. Interacting with everyone at Houzz was relatively laid-back. Had a brief phone talk to set up a technical interview. The interview didn't seem challenging, but the interviewer had a hard time following a straightforward response.