Same 4-step process as everyone else has described, only so far I've only made it to the 2nd step. I'm astonishingly bad at timed coding challenges (which have come up in zero actual professional roles, but the majority of job applications). Anyway, the Codility test that Toptal uses was no different - 100 minutes to solve 3 problems. I came very close to solving two of them, but not close enough for any of the automated tests to pass. Turns out they don't review your solutions at all (except to check if you copied your algorithm from something online) so it doesn't matter at all how clean and well-commented your code is, if it doesn't pass any of the tests. I suspect that just hard-coding the answers to the examples they provide would have given me a higher score. Anyway, my advice is, solve the first problem before moving on to the second. A perfect score on one of three questions isn't enough to pass, but it's very close. A perfect score on two out of three is way higher than you need to move forward, so probably getting half-way on two would pass. Which I guess would mean getting the gist of the solution but missing the edge-cases or something. Personally, I've only ever gotten one of two scores on any Codility test: 0 or 100; so I'm not really sure how you'd get partial credit. But that's apparently what you need to hit Toptal's minimum requirement for Stage 2. So, I'm gonna try to improve on timed coding challenges, and then retake it in a month. I'm a little baffled by the people on here who had negative experiences, especially the ones who complain about how Toptal will "use any excuse to not hire you." Toptal's motto is literally that they only accept the top 3%. How could you possibly be surprised that have high standards?