My Relevel Tournament Experience
Relevel by Unacademy is India’s First Hiring Tests Platform. It was introduced to facilitate students to appear for a single test on their platform and get eligible for multiple startups recruiting on their platform based on the relevel scores.
As you might have guessed from the title, I appeared for the tournament. To all the eagled-eye readers, Yes, I had my Relevel test on 14th July 2021. One day before anyone else could appear for it. Let me explain how!
Relevel had a few job openings for the internship role in June 2021, one of those for the position of Frontend Developer Intern. I applied for the same and later came to know that Relevel decided to hire interns through their hiring challenges because if they didn’t hire via their challenges, why would other companies do? (But there’s a catch)
Deferred multiple times, they finally decided to take the test for the internship applicants on 14th July, just a day before they officially opened the platform for everyone on the web.
More than they were interested in hiring interns, they were interested in using us as guinea pigs to beta test their platform one day before the launch. In short, the experience sucked. So much so, I dropped myself from further participation after their first-round itself.
If you are a frontend developer or interested in frontend development, you might have appeared for some of the tests or interviews. If you haven’t, lemme take you through some of the questions that are asked in companies like Razorpay, Chegg, SquadStack, etc.
Tests for frontend developers involve questions around JavaScript, CSS, HTML5 Semantics, Networking, Performance Optimisation, and of course, relatively easier DSA. Questions are mostly similar in interviews, focussing majorly on JavaScript (closures, scopes, IIFE, etc.).
Well, if you are proficient in these topics, I mean, the general topics relating to frontend development, Relevel Tournament is not meant for you! As the Relevel team told me, the process was created consulting the industry experts. I don’t know which “Industry Expert” would ask them to ask questions relating to OS in a Frontend Developer’s Test.
Let me break down their tournament. The first test of the tournament is the “Back to Basics” test. This test comprised of 0 questions actually relating to the questions I just discussed that were asked in a generic frontend test. Well, then what else did it had?
A lot of OS questions (honestly, I thought they might include 1–2 questions), DBMS’s functional-dependency-related questions (I expected some queries instead), Code-snippets (in C++), and some medium-hard DSA questions. Let’s stop for a moment and think about the relevance these questions have from the actual profile.
I am pretty sure if you drag a Sr. Frontend Developer from Relevel’s Team and hand him over this test, he would gracefully fail this!
Post this round, I decided not to continue with further tests since I got a gist of the topics they would grill the candidates on. Yet, I decided to go through all of the rounds to realize if participation in so many rounds in a single day is possible.
Post the first round, there was the “Access your Algo” round, where they had 3 DSA questions to be solved. As soon as I thought about what could go wrong in this one (except my knowledge), their platform literally gave me a headache. Apart from the bad UX they had, their platform had no way to access the console or the output of the code. They neither had any test case to test the basic working of your code on. It was basically a black box where you executed your code, and it just returned with some score in %age. Neither could you use any IDE for the same because of their proctoring software.
Questions in this round were not the toughest, but with their black box in place and with a time limit of 90 minutes for 3 questions, this was tough.
Post the end of the first test, I had expressed my thoughts to the Relevel team and received a call from them after the end of the second round to discuss what actually went wrong. In my conversation, I really didn’t feel they were planning to do anything about this since they repetitively told me that they had consulted “Industry Experts” before setting the tests.
The next 2 rounds were mainly focused on React, creating a personal Trello dashboard for relevel. This was fairly simple, and I got that done before the time limit. But at that point, there was no point in submitting, so I invested the time to write this article :)
In my opinion, you’d get a pretty good headache after the 3rd round. This tournament is beyond the limits of any human being to completed in a single day. I don’t know if anyone is even participating in the tournament right now. Their beta-test failed big-time one day before the actual launch.
I really wanted to share the questions, but I don’t think that would be an ethical thing to do, so at the moment, all I am sharing is my experience!
This is what happens when you invest so much in marketing that you literally forget about the product itself.
