SchooLinks Interview Questions
& Process

The team is great and they want you to do an exercise where you walk through one of their projects. Make sure to spend a decent amount of time on it to make it perfect even though they say to only spent 1 - 2 hours

The HR/recruiter was super nice and warm during the first chat, felt like a good intro to the company. After that, they set up a 1.5 hour technical assessment which involved a Loom video showing the platform from different angles, then a quiz. Whether you move on totally depends on your quiz scores. I got rejected the very next business day via a super cold, impersonal form email.

The interview process started with a 20-minute call with the recruiter, who seemed uninterested. Then, I had to complete a digital assessment, which was the most bizarre thing I've encountered in the EdTech industry. It involved watching a 60-minute product demo video, for which I took extensive notes (over 6 pages). Immediately after, I had to take an eight-page pop quiz on the video's content within 30 minutes, which was barely enough time to even watch the video. I'm not a great test-taker, and the 30 seconds between the video and the test weren't enough to process all the information, especially my notes. I failed the test and was rejected a week later. For an education company, they didn't accommodate different learning styles; instead, I felt pressured to know details about a product I'd never used. It felt unreasonable and lacked empathy for learning styles that need preparation before testing. Even my college professors allowed study time. The whole experience left me feeling embarrassed, gaslit, and confused. Given the negative reviews from former employees, I might have dodged a bullet. Good luck, SchooLinks.

The interview started with a Zoom call with the hiring manager, which lasted for 45 minutes. After that, there was a pair programming exercise scheduled for an hour. This session was quite late, at 9pm my local time, with a lead engineer from China. This felt like a red flag suggesting late night meetings would be common. Unlike other companies, SchooLinks didn't provide a project to start with for the live coding challenge. They just said, 'It will take about an hour and you'll need to come to the challenge with your environment set up (a blank Django project with DRF (Django REST Framework) installed and any flavor of SQL database - SQLite is totally fine for the exercise).' So, I spent an hour setting up a Docker environment with a Django project and a Postgres database, and got DRF all set up. The actual challenge involved creating database models for actors, movies, related movies, and movie genres. I also had to create various API views with different serializers. I spent most of the hour coding to meet all the requirements. I wondered how it would have gone if I hadn't taken the initiative to set up my environment. The next day, I was told the interviewer felt I lacked Django and DRF experience, which was surprising given my experience. My advice to SchooLinks is to prepare a ready-to-run environment for candidates in their coding challenges. It was unprofessional to pass this responsibility to the candidate.