I have hired many employees over the years, so I want to speak from that perspective.
Whenever a position is available (including those for Academic classes), there will *always* be a larger number of applicants than can be interviewed.
Therefore, a filtering process is put in place to weed out the majority of applicants right off the bat (be it by a computer program, a recruiter, or some other process.)
The next layer will depend on the size of the company, but usually involves a pre-screen by someone lower level to see if you are are generally competent. (For engineers, this is often where you will be sent to something like hackerrank).
From my own experience, if you made it to me in the interview process, I was purely testing you for team fit and overall adaptability. I will have had all the notes and scores from every test and interview along the way, or you wouldn’t have gotten to me in the first place.
You may be absolutely perfect on paper, and have an amazing personality, and even be a candidate I would love to have (in isolation), but my gut feeling is that you would throw off the dynamics of the team I currently have in place.
So, be proud of how far you have gotten in these interviews. The right job and team will come along as long as you remain open to it.
I would suggest that in your next interviews you ask the hiring managers about the team in place and the company culture as a whole, then respond with something that will enable them to envision you fitting in to that.
Originally Posted: https://www.quora.com/I-just-got-a-rejection-from-Stanfords-MS-program-Last-year-I-got-rejected-from-Google-Palantir-and-Facebook-after-making-it-through-to-final-rounds-of-interviews-in-each-With-these-rejections-I-feel-like-I-am-faltering-in-life-How-do-I-pick-up-strongly
Originally Posted On: 2015-03-22