Hulu Interview Questions

Interview

3 phone interview + the day on site, flew me in to their santa monica office. rather intense day on site - meeting with 6 different teammembers plus some people from marketing side. standard CS questions on phone, more case studies on site, plus statistical questions and machine learning

Interview Questions

Application

I applied online. I interviewed at Hulu.

Interview

I had a phone interview & was asked to come in for an onsite. I arrived & waited an entire hour before the person who invited me in knowledged me. She said she didn't know I was there and the person who I was supposed to interview with was no longer available. She said she would call me later to reschedule. I never heard back. As a recruiter, I found this to be a horrible candidate experience and terribly unprofessional. If this is representative of how employees are treated or company culture, I can't recommend applying.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied online. The process took 3+ weeks. I interviewed at Hulu (Santa Monica, CA) in March 2016.

Interview

First interview was a phone interview with the two hiring managers. HR then had me put together a very extensive work sample project before I could move onto the next round. There were 3 questions, but it really broke down to 5 different questions in each question. I thought the questions were relevant and well thought out, but it was a lot of work for a lower level title. For the final round I went to the Hulu office in Santa Monica for a 4 hour interview where I met with 10 different people. Everyone was nice/young/smart overall - but I don't like this style as it doesn't give the candidate a chance to really get to know the hiring manager or vice versa. Sure, it's nice to get other people's opinions on a candidate but the hiring manager should really be the one spending quality time with the candidate and getting to know them. One of the hiring managers I met with seemed so rushed like I was inconveniencing her by taking 30 minutes of her time, not a good first impression.

The part that really bothered me, though, was the way HR handled me as an applicant. They promised to get back to me by the end of the following week, and I didn't hear back until 2.5 weeks later. I didn't receive an offer and HR emailed me with a generic statement about how feedback was good, stay in touch, etc. Comparatively, I was a finalist at Netflix and their HR team called me every step of the way to deliver me information which I found much more respectful. I spent hours and hours on this interview and preparing a work sample, the least I could have gotten was a call to inform me of a final decision.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Hulu (New York, NY) in February 2013.

Interview

This process was long, repetitive and draining. They were all very nice but the whole process is way too long and take a lot of your time especially when you have to take time off, if you currently have a job. There are 4-5 separated phone interviews, then an all day in person interview and Skype interview. They kept basically asking the same questions every time. Way too long, especially if they feel they were not going hire me.

Application

I applied through college or university. The process took a week. I interviewed at Hulu in October 2014.

Interview

Hulu's HR is great and has super fast response time. Applied at university and got an email within a few days. First round was a timed online coding problem which was a breeze for me.

Second round is to write code on the web using something like Google Docs during phone interview. The questions were quite hard, but manageable. The interviewer didn't care about what I was saying, and he walked away from the phone many times during the interview when I was coding and had to ask him for clarifications. When I got a chance to ask him questions, he told me "I don't know" to everything - even his opinions on working at the position. I did not even get a "thank you" before he hang up.

However, HR followed up promptly and politely with me every time.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied through other source. The process took 2+ weeks. I interviewed at Hulu (Los Angeles, CA).

Interview

Recruiter contacted me in Linkedin. And I did the 1st phone screen 10 days later. The next day I was told that I took the 2nd phone interview and scheduled it a week later. Didn't get the on-site interview.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Hulu (Santa Monica, CA).

Interview

Submitted online and get contacted by company HR. First round of phone interview, the same as all the others on glassdoor. Give two code segments 15 min before the call and was asked what is the code doing, time complexity.
Second round of phone interview, asked to write code to print company hierarchy. Used hashtable. Get the rejection letter the second business day.

Interview Questions

Application

I interviewed at Hulu in June 2013.

Interview

Phone interview: sample code was given. It is about finding our if two strings consist of the same set of characters. The code is a complex and implemented using recursion with one utility function to remove ith character from a given string.

Interview Questions

Interview

Online Test in an hour

Interview Questions

Application

I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Hulu in September 2013.

Interview

There was an initial interview which was HR round.
For the second round they have given two codes and discussed the outputs in the actual interview. Code complexities and how to improve the performance was discussed.
For the third, they gave me a situation, and asked what data structures would be best for such a case. Then spent time to improve the complexity.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Hulu (Santa Monica, CA) in November 2013.

Interview

I was referred by my friend who interned there during the summer and got a return offer.

The recruiting processing started right away the next day by asking me to finish a online test. It's like a OnlineJudge style test and you have to finish two problems in 1 hour. Two problems are fairly easy (anyone who call themselves a programmer should have no problem nail it within 45 minutes). My guess is this is used as an initial filtering process.

I got a phone screen interview invitation within 12hours (quite amazing). We scheduled the time and got the phone call the following week. A guy from LA office interviewed me. It was a 1-hour-ish technical phone interview, but nothing surprising with that -- algorithm and data structure question you can probably get from any company in the industry. He asked me to write the working code in real time via something as a google doc. In fact I only answered one question because the first one looks tricky and actually fairly easy. After I pointed out what the problem is actually about, he decided that we just skip it don't waste our time on writing the routine code of that.

I finished writing the code by 30 minutes something. So that we got plenty of time talking about the company like what the working day is like, how's the team look like so on and so forth. It was a quite casual talk and the interviewer is extremely nice and funny.

45 minutes after the phone call (Yes, 45 minutes, pretty impressive) I got the email that they decided to fly me to LA for a onsite interview. The recruiter send a travel agent to set me up the flight and hotel (they even offer me a second night hotel stay after I told them I want to stay one more day to meet with my friend I mentioned at the beginning).

Four rounds of 1on1 interview (you can choose whiteboard or a computer). 1 in the morning and 3 in the afternoon (I heard for most cases it's 2 in the morning and 2 in the afternoon). They are all regular on site interviews about algorithm, data structure, system design etc. They normally will ask you to write actual code for every problem.

The last one was with a manager like guy, after we talked about the pipe implementation in *NIX shell (I did something similar before and put it on my resume) we just sat down and talk about the work in Hulu. That's the moment I felt like they really like me. After all interviews the recruiter showed me around the working area and we headed back to the interviewing room. Then to my most shockingly surprise, she said they decided to offer me the job here.

During the whole process, Hulu successfully shows me that how much they value their candidates and how responsive they are. The total waiting time for the whole process combined is less than a day(12 hour + 45 min + instantly). The sent me the offer letter later, the compensation is satisfied and I took the offer.

Interview Questions

Negotiation

I wasn't really negotiating much cuz the compensation is very satisfied.