Zillow Interview Questions

Application

I applied in-person. The process took 2+ months. I interviewed at Zillow (Seattle, WA).

Interview

Overall, I would probably go through the process again but there is still very much room for improvement and lots to be weary about.

PROS
- Interviewers were very nice people.
- All of the questions I was asked were fair. No curveballs or gotchas.

CONS
- I actually failed my first phone screen with feedback saying that they were looking for candidates with better coding skills. I'm not sure how that was the case since my code had optimal complexity and pretty clean code (as clean as it can be when you're used to) and this company should really just stick with canned, non-specific rejection emails. Plus, I was still hit up by a recruiter a month later and had a phone screen that I passed, so not sure my coding skills were that bad.

- There was a big delay my second time around between talking to the recruiter and getting a phone screen. Probably about a month.

- So for my second time around, the phone screen interviewer didn't say anything during the entire phone screen and I'm pretty sure he wasn't even on codepair link since I only saw my name up. It sounded more like he was just doing work or emails in the background.

- Seemed like Zillow is a bit Google obsessed: same interview style questions, recruiters bragging that their engineers choose them over Google, and calling you for a rejection. Google and other big tech companies attract a certain, myopic kind of personality. And saying you have Google talent doesn't attract all of us. In fact, it's going to push some of us, like myself, away. And in reality, Zillow might be a reputable tech company in Seattle but it doesn't have the same clout in other cities, so no need to force that Google comparison.

- Seemed as if some of the questions I was asked about a current employer were loaded questions, was asked if I was running away from anything, putting me in between a rock and a hard place of not talking poorly about a professional leadership but also not sounding congruent with some of that current employer's bad reputation.

- Usually companies just email you to reject you. In this case, Zillow didn't get back for a week and made it over a phone call. Phone calls aren't that much longer than reading an email but it's still a general waste of time in comparison. Moreover, the feedback I got was, "We had another candidate whose experience was better for the role but all the interviewers wanted you to know that they still see you being a great fit for Zillow." This just comes across as fake because if Zillow really meant that, then they'd follow-up with another onsite for a different role. It's at this point when I see why companies give canned rejection emails.

In general, I just think that Zillow is walking this line between trying to have Google-tier technical talent but also being the greatest place to work with the nicest people and this sincerity comes off as phony and forced because they're still a huge tech company.

Will probably interview with them again in the future, but will just be a bit weary.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Zillow (Seattle, WA).

Interview

Phone call then invite to interview in person. The phone call went really well and the in-person interview was just ok. I really disliked that they provided so little feedback. Afterward, I had to follow up to hear back on whether I received the offer or not though I was already sure when I was walking out that I didn't.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied online. I interviewed at Zillow (Seattle, WA).

Interview

I had a recruiter screen then a hiring manager screen. Hiring manager stated that I would be invited to an on site, but didn't hear back from recruiter until three weeks later saying that the position was filled. Terrible communication and lack of respect for candidates

Application

I applied through a recruiter. The process took a week. I interviewed at Zillow.

Interview

I was contacted by a technical recruiter followed by an amazing conversation on phone about my technical interests and experience which led to a phone screen.
The phone screen was interesting, it started off with a behavioural phase where I had to explain a little bit about myself and an interesting project I did. The interviewer was clearly not happy with the project I described.
This was followed by a series of Machine Learning questions like what technologies (classification,etc) have you worked on etc and what algorithms did I use before. Next was about overfitting, how do I identify and overcome it, the interviewer was unhappy with the usual bias vs variance,cross validation, re-sampling,feature engineering,regularization, other methods(ensemble etc) based answers and had no intention of giving a hit of what was being expected and there were some routine machine learning questions that test if I had other basic ML knowledge.
This was followed by a coding challenge on codepair. It was an easy problem straight from leetcode (string + dp) but the funny part was the interviewer was pissed off at the dp solution and demanded a 2**n recursive solution. At this point it was clear for me that interview derailed a long time back and felt like the interviewer was not at all interested in making the call.
The obvious reject came a week later on a holiday in the usual email format.
PS: The interviewer constantly yelled whenever he did not like my answer and made some unprofessional remarks about how people lack experience in dealing with problems.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied through a recruiter. The process took a week. I interviewed at Zillow (Irvine, CA) in April 2018.

Interview

A very pleasant one. Started by an initial phone interview with Lauren. Proceeded with another phone interview. Called for the onsite interview.

The whole process was amazing and they treated me exceptionally well.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied online. The process took a week. I interviewed at Zillow (Seattle, WA) in April 2018.

Interview

Applied for a SDE position. Recruiter was very fast in responding. Set up an initial 30 minute phone chat to talk over your resume, technologies you worked on, etc. Next step was a one hour technical phone screen.

For the phone screen, I paired with a senior developer who is not a member of the team I applied for. Understandable but this also caused some problems with the interview direction. My interviewer must have been looking for questions based on my resume and since he saw the words "full stack" the first question he asked involved making 3 letters in separate divs be aligned into 3 columns (bonus for responsive design) on a simulated web page by making CSS changes. While I have worked with CSS before that's not what I'd consider my area of expertise and would certainly not be able to whip something like this up within 10 minutes. If I had prepared for it beforehand then certainly (I mean, it's CSS not red black trees) but the team I was applying into does not mention web development at all (the recruiter said they are working with Python) so I was not expecting to be tested on CSS stuff. So obviously, I bumbled around for 10 minutes and must have looked like an idiot.

If I were to judge I'd say that the next question didn't go so well either. I'd say that the question was initially poorly worded and included no examples of the expected input and outputs, something I'd normally expect to see. As a consequence, I initially programmed in the wrong direction and had to fix my approach after the interviewer clarified the question. That led to some messiness.

One piece of advice I'd like to offer to the interviewers at Zillow, if you're reading this, is not to make specific assumptions of what you candidates may or may not have done based on their resume. I came into the interview expecting to be asked architecture, data structure, and algorithms problems typically expected from the back-end position I applied for and instead was thrown way off by a CSS question as if I am primarily a web developer (which if you couldn't tell already, I am NOT). Who knows, maybe I'm a brilliant at solving your back end challenges but alas, we'll never know now will we?

Interview Questions

Application

I applied online. The process took 4+ weeks. I interviewed at Zillow (Dallas, TX) in April 2018.

Interview

I applied directly through their website in January 2018 and got the notification in April 2018 after which the whole process took 1+ month

My first interaction with Zillow was through an HR call in which one of the HRs asked specific questions based on my resume and past experience. She inquired about my visa status, relocation preference and my experience with the previous employer. At the end of the call she said that she will try best to match my experience with the relevant team at Zillow and sent me a hackerrank assessment.

As the second round, i was given 40 hours to finish a programming assessment on hackerrank. I choose to do it in Java. There were two moderately complex programming task which, given the time, can be easily solved. Thumbs up to that.

I got the result of the second round two weeks after my submission and a different HR mailed me asking for my availability during the next two weeks for an interview with a Machine Learning Engineer at Zillow. I provided several dates from the next two weeks and they chose one of those.

This is the part where things got finicky. During the e-mail conversations and on-call discussion, It was made clear that this upcoming interview will be about my past experience and ML in general. I left no stone unturned to prepare fundamentals of ML with coding in R to give it my best shot. (I can put my github link to show how much I actually prepared for this thing, but then it doesn't remain anonymous)

Seems like a good strategy. Right ? Wrong!
So I got the call from the ML engineer at Zillow who started the interview asking for my introduction and some questions on what i did as a part of my last internship. As i was given a hackerrank link prior to this interview for peer coding, we both logged into it and what came next was nothing short of a surprise for me. He started asking questions on data structures and manipulations while he was supposed to discuss ML. It felt more like a software engineer interview and had nothing to do with ML.

I tried informing him that this is not what he is supposed to ask, as discussed before with the HRs and in the emails and the position is for an ML engineer but he said he's gonna ask data structures (apparently for no reason). So much effort of writing KNN, NN, Regression, Clustering etc from scratch in R goes to waste as it looked like my interviewer wasn't interested in ML (AT ALL).

As i struggled through the interview, i tried hard, solving those tricky questions in data structures and could not solve any. It wasn't something i couldn't do, it just came as a shock and caught me completely off guard. At the very end, (in the 55th minute of the scheduled 1 hour interview) he asked some concepts about ML algorithms which i can say i nailed.

The next day, i mailed the second HR informing her about the incidence and requesting a proper ML interview (since i am still confident about my abilities for this position as ML is what i do on daily basis, being a Data Science graduate student). She never replied back.

Two days later, I got a rejection email for the same indicating the " other candidates whose skills and experience better align with the needs for this role". (Sure)

Things that went wrong-

1. Highly unreachable HRs : Using jobvite accounts to send emails and due to some bug, i couldn't see those messages in jobvite. I sent a email to the HR explaining the situation after the interview. Still waiting for a reply.

2. Disregard for matching candidate's skills with respective team : Although the HRs said she would best match my experience with a team in Zillow, i was surprised to hear when my interviewer explained the technologies they work on in a typical day. Since I am working more in R and have little experience with Python (it isn't even listed on my resume), basically i had to start from ground zero if i were ever to join that team. I am fine with learning new technologies and would have contributed readily in a R based team, but thats just bad matching-up on HRs part.

Good things about this experience
1. Everyone was very professional and courteous.
2. Time management with 3 graduate courses during ML preparation for this interview.
3. No matter what the position is, you gotta do some irrelevant hackerrank assessment (idk when the world will move past this, anyway!)

I really hoped to give feedback to the team, but seeing their apathy towards communication, I'd rather tell you guys here. Hope it helps.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Zillow (Seattle, WA) in April 2018.

Interview

Interview Process:
1. Recruiter phone screen
2. Take home test (Zestimate)
3. Technical Phone screen
4. On-site (5 rounds)

Team was good, hiring process is fast but whatever recruiter asked me to focus on, for the interview, the actual interview did not at all had a focus on that. There was some mis-management for specifically my case too because the process started and they kept telling me that they need spatial data scientist kind of a person but they never, in the whole process judged me on my spatial data experience(not even a single question).

Interview Questions

Application

I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Zillow (Seattle, WA) in March 2018.

Interview

A recruiter contacted me on LinkedIn and set up a technical phone screen a week later. The interviewer was from another team. We started with 5-10 minutes of obligatory introductory questions, then jumped into the coding challenge on HackerRank.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Zillow (Denver, CO) in March 2018.

Interview

I applied online and received an email from the recruiter within 15mins.

We then scheduled a phone call to take place later in the week. During the call we discussed why I wanted to leave my current company, what am I looking for in a position, as well as compensation expectations and benefits.

Next I had a call with the hiring manager. During this call the manager was interested in my skills in sales as well as my personal interest.

I then went onsite and interviewed in a group setting with three Zillow employees (hiring manager, another manager, and the GM). I was tasked to prepare a presentation discussing Zillow's value prop, growth strategies, and their place in the real estate industry. The presentation lasted 15mins, then 35 mins of question. During this time they went round robin asking questions. Finally it ended with 10 mins of my questions for them. The Zillow team really valued the questions I had for them (both during the in person and on the phone) and this was one of the area I shined in the interview process.

I went back onsite for addtional interviews. This came off as unconventional in their hiring process. I met 30mins with the hiring manager and 30mins with a different GM/ Site Leader. This step was really beneficial for me to talk with the hiring manager in a candid format, which in my situation was the opportunity to tell them I was no longer interested in the role. The conversation with the Site Leader was straight forward and teh typical conversation you would have with someone running an office (very high level, no specifics, general business conversation).

Interview Questions