Understanding Job Rejection After a Coding Task: What Can I Improve?

Navigating the job application process can be challenging, especially when a promising opportunity doesn’t turn out as expected. If you’ve recently gone through an interview process and received disappointing feedback, it’s natural to question where you might have fallen short. Let’s explore a detailed example of such an experience, analyze potential areas for growth, and provide guidance on how to move forward confidently.

A Case Study: Interviewing for a Junior React Developer Role

Imagine you’re a self-taught developer with a portfolio of React components and websites, seeking your first professional role. You land an interview for a junior React developer position — tasked with migrating a PHP site to React. The interview involves a scenario-based coding challenge, not live coding, where you’re asked to verbally outline your approach for creating an accessible, validated form with specific requirements:

• Three inputs: First Name, Last Name, Email, each required with placeholders, including a red asterisk.
• The First Name field has a 160-character limit with a live character count.
• The form submits data, sending it to a third-party email validation service, returning a JSON response.
• Validation occurs before submission, with errors displayed beneath each respective field.

Given only 30 minutes to plan and demonstrate your approach, you begin with strategic steps: creating a Git branch, reviewing existing code, planning component structure, setting up state management, handling validation, and ensuring accessibility.

Throughout the outline, you consider various implementation details—handling input changes, managing validation errors, structuring the form, and preparing for async operations like sending data to an email service.

When the time runs out, you present your plan confidently. The interviewers ask follow-up questions about handling the email check asynchronously, providing user feedback during submission (like disabling the submit button), and testing your code.

However, despite the effort, you’re informed shortly afterward that you didn’t progress further due to your skill set not aligning with their expectations. They felt your knowledge wasn’t deep enough for the tasks involved.

Reflections and Lessons Learned

Receiving such feedback can be discouraging, but it’s also an opportunity to reflect:

1. Depth of Technical Knowledge: For example, knowing the specific regular expression for email validation, handling edge cases, managing character limits dynamically, and implementing more robust validation states might strengthen your approach.

2. Experience with Asynchronous Operations: Demonstrating how to perform API calls inside React components using `