This was a 4 step process:
- Initial chat with the Senior Recruiter – mostly behavioral and questions about my experience and how it fits with Ollie's tech stack.
- Initial chat with the hiring manager ( Front end lead in my case) – behavioral and technical front end questions.
- Take home assessment – React based take home that can be built locally but then zipped and uploaded for review.
- Final round (3 consecutive interviews on the same day – roughly 3 hours) – see below for description
The take home:
- Is incredibly fair and is more of an assessment of your understanding of React. This also tests your ability to setup a codebase that's easy to understand and maintainable. It's reflective of a real life project you may work on for Ollie as well and isn't timed, although they don't expect you to work longer than 2 hours on it.
The final round consists of:
- 1 hour: a review of your take home assessment, questions about architecture/structure, and design choices. Questions about what you'd do to improve the build. Then about 10 minutes of technical questions about React.
- 1 hour: collaborative coding session to build something in React over a live code sharing app. You're allowed to Google for things in case you can't remember certain things which is appreciated.
- 45 minutes: Behavioral interview with Backend lead and a Product Manager
Overall, I would say that the interview process is thorough and fair. It's a true test of whether or not you actually know how to build in React (between the take home, review of that take home, and the collaborative assessment) rather than a test on your ability with algorithms which have become popular. If you struggle with React, this will be very hard. But if you enjoy building in React and have a fair amount of experience with it then I think it will be easy.
Beyond that, everyone was extremely friendly, engaging, and easy going. They were very encouraging, and I can tell that the team was very open minded and curious about my thought processes and take on how to tackle problems while also sharing their own thoughts.