Zillow Interview Questions

Application

I applied online. I interviewed at Zillow (Seattle, WA) in June 2018.

Interview

I applied online and within two days I got a confirmation for the phone interview. During the day of the interview, from the time of the call started till the end, there was a constant background noise of people laughing and chatting and it made me really uncomfortable while answering the questions. I don’t even know if the recruiter could hear me. I was really confident of making it because my answers well rehearsed but the interview experience was below average.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Zillow.

Interview

A recruiter will contact you for a phone interview with the Hiring Manager. If they decide to bring you in, they will typically have you interview with 4 people on the interview loop. It will be either a panel or 4 consecutive interviewers. They will ask you situational and experience based questions.

Interview Questions

Interview

After one phone interview, I got the chance to a on-site interview. I had great experience there except the last round. The interviewer of last round is tough person.

Application

I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Zillow (Seattle, WA) in May 2018.

Interview

Overall, I had a very positive experience. I had an initial phone screen followed by an assessment. Then I had another phone screen and eventually the group interview. The hiring process was very efficient and effective; kudos to the recruiter and hiring manager since they made it very pleasant!

Interview Questions

Application

I applied online. The process took 2+ weeks. I interviewed at Zillow (Seattle, WA) in May 2018.

Interview

The interview process was relatively straightforward - I was reached out within 24 hours after applying by a member of the recruiting team to schedule a time to connect via phone. The initial phone screen was about half an hour in length, where the recruiter had asked questions about my current situation, interests, experience, and some behavioral based questions. Afterwards, the recruiter had coordinated a time to speak with the hiring manager. The second-round phone interview with the hiring manager was an easygoing conversation, where it was more casual and engaged. I was informed that I had answered all questions perfectly and the recruiter will be in touch to walk over next steps in the process. Unfortunately, I wasn't selected to proceed onto an on-site interview. It's definitely understandable given that it was a competitive selection process. However, the overall experience was rather negative. I had waited 1.5 weeks even with follow-up communication only to be sent a generic rejection email by the recruiter. It would have been great if personalized feedback was provided.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied online. The process took 2+ weeks. I interviewed at Zillow in May 2018.

Interview

Recruiter call followed by phone. Terrible experience. Looks like inexperienced people are taking interviews here.Terrible experience. Looks like inexperienced people are taking interviews here. Poor time management, irrelevant discussions, rude behavior, super arrogant.

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 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 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