Zopa interview questions

1. Recruiter call 2. Virtual interview with two team members. 3. In person interview for ‘culture fit’. Questions were asked you’d expect, medium difficulty networking with about AWS and on prem networking.

I applied for a mid level data analyst position. They quoted the salary at 48-53K. Applied online, had an initial chat with the recruiter that was super informal and was just a high level chat through experience. The next step was a Hackerrank SQL online test. This can be completed in your own time, and it checks if your camera is on and if you have any additional screens plugged in before starting. The test was incredibly difficult for a mid level position, the first question required use of a CTE or subquery, the second needed quite a complex solution for finding the average response time per agent per day. The third went even and required the use of two CTEs, the fourth was even more complicated and would need you to write on the fly a huge query returning several stats, including using windows functions for the fourth. As well as that, it is timed and you only have an hour. I went in thinking this was for a mid level, 50K job, so the most I’d be getting is perhaps a join and maybe a CTE at the most. But to ask an analyst to write a long and complicated query under time pressure, joining together several datasets, is insane for such a mid level role. The email I was sent clearly said senior DQL data test, so my assumption was they use a more senior test to check your level, but you’re not expected to answer all the questions because if you’re at senior level, why would you be applying for a 50K job? But I received an email a week later saying I was unsuccessful due to answering 2 of the 4 questions (I actually answered the third 90% of the way, I just couldn’t get it to run in time!). Based on other reviews, I’m not surprised by this dodgy practice and overall I was left with a poor opinion of this business. I am still firmly of the opinion that you can’t test SQL under time pressure in this way, not unless the questions are much simpler. It isn’t reflective of a real life situation where you’d have a lot more time to plan and work through queries.