I had many interviews until today. In all cases, HR only collects some concrete information from you such as your possible starting date, your experience in years, your salary expectation and so on. Then, they decide to evaluate you technically or not. If you are available to start on a later date or if you have a high salary expectation, you are going to eliminate in this stage for sure. Now, what happened to me with Shopify is below: Following exactly 1 month of my application, HR send me an e-mail for the first HR talk. We spoke about really very general things. How are you? What do you expect from a good company? Do you know what we are doing? Can you summarize your work experience briefly? and so on. In a couple of days, I got a rejection e-mail that there are more experienced people and fit the position better. However, it was nothing but a friendly speak. This is the first time I see that an HR evaluate you for a technical position and decide for you to pass or fail to the next stages with her lack of technical knowledge. We did not speak nothing serious basically. It looks like they were looking for a friend rather than an engineer. My bad...