I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at LinkedIn (Mountain View, CA) in Oct 2015
Interview
I interviewed to many top companies in Silicon Valley, but I must say LinkedIn gave the best interview experience to me.
Process went as follows:
- Recruiter contacted me via LinkedIn to see if I was interested in working for LinkedIn
- I interviewed for Mobile Software Engineer (Android)
1st Phone Screen:
A Coding exercise on Collabedit. Very friendly interviewer.
Things worked out fine, so they decided to move forward for an onsite with me. They booked nice hotel and rental car. My recruiter called in the morning to check on me and give last minute inspiration talks. I arrived at their office and checked in at the reception. My recruiter came and gave me a campus tour. Campus gave a good positive feeling. Then I was brought to an interview room that was reserved for me. On the White board they had written "Welcome 'In' *my_name*! You got this". There was a nice goodie bag kept for refreshments that I might need the whole day.
1st round: Android coding challenge on my laptop
2nd round: Design question
3rd round: Technical OOP/ Datastructures
Lunch.
4th round: Interview with hiring manager
5th round: Technical OOP/ Datastructure/Android
6th round: Design
After my last interview my interviewer dropped me till my car. My recruiter called me again to check on me.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Q: Was asked a couple of design questions which i found were tough. The questions will be open ended and vague, but that'll be the real test.
The interview process started with a screening round featuring one LeetCode medium problem and an SQL challenge. This was followed by a comprehensive onsite with five rounds: a LeetCode coding challenge, an SQL assessment, a system design interview, a hiring manager conversation to evaluate cultural fit, and finally a team matching phase to find the right team.
Interviewed for an SDE role. The process was well-organized and the recruiters were responsive throughout. That said, the technical rounds were significantly more challenging than expected — definitely come prepared to go deep. Overall a valuable experience regardless of the outcome.
That was a real stroke of luck — when I got to the coding round and encountered a question on finding the maximum subarray sum, I had literally seen this exact problem on prachub.com a few days earlier. The interview kicked off with a recruiter screen, followed by a technical phone interview. It was intense, especially with the focus on algorithms and data structures. I also faced some behavioral questions that challenged my experience. After a final onsite round, I received an offer and happily accepted. Overall, it was tough but rewarding.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an integer array nums, find the contiguous subarray (containing at least one number) which has the largest sum and return its sum. Walk through Kadane's algorithm and explain the O(n) approach.
Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at LinkedIn with 3.1 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 50% positive. To compare, the company-average is 54.2% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Software Engineer roles take an average of 23 days to get hired, when considering 316 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at LinkedIn overall takes an average of 28 days.
Common stages of the interview process at LinkedIn as a Software Engineer according to 316 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 48%
One on one interview: 19%
Skills test: 12%
Group panel interview: 8%
Presentation: 6%
Background check: 3%
Personality test: 2%
IQ intelligence test: 1%
Other: 1%
Drug test: 1%
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