Speaking as an interviewer at a corporation, referrals put your name higher on a list of people to interview, and they get you absolutely nothing else.
Internal recruiters/HR are also terrible. I've lost count of how many times we'll receive a CV from someone that applied online and then when we call them they tell us they applied months ago and aren't interested anymore. So don't feel too disheartened.
I can't get my head around coding challenges. When I was looking for a job when I wanted to leave my graduate position I encountered a few of these. Either it was homework that they reviewed (and printed out the wrong source code when interviewing me) or it was a C# written test when I'd never done any C# in my life. I'm not really a fan of super technical show-me-you-know-angulars-implementation-detail interviews, I think it's just an opprtubity for the interviewer to act like they're shit hot. If they've got (even a tiny amount of) programming experience, show they're interested, can work through simple problems and describe what they're doing they can probably pick up whatever the fashionable programmibg language/library is now.
On the topic of tailoring an interview, I think its nice to keep some common questions across candidates so there's some useful reference point and bechmark.
Internal recruiters/HR are also terrible. I've lost count of how many times we'll receive a CV from someone that applied online and then when we call them they tell us they applied months ago and aren't interested anymore. So don't feel too disheartened.
I can't get my head around coding challenges. When I was looking for a job when I wanted to leave my graduate position I encountered a few of these. Either it was homework that they reviewed (and printed out the wrong source code when interviewing me) or it was a C# written test when I'd never done any C# in my life. I'm not really a fan of super technical show-me-you-know-angulars-implementation-detail interviews, I think it's just an opprtubity for the interviewer to act like they're shit hot. If they've got (even a tiny amount of) programming experience, show they're interested, can work through simple problems and describe what they're doing they can probably pick up whatever the fashionable programmibg language/library is now.
On the topic of tailoring an interview, I think its nice to keep some common questions across candidates so there's some useful reference point and bechmark.