I applied through university. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Mar 2016
Interview
Started with two phone screens before an on-site interview. On-site interview was 4 rounds on 1:1 or 2:1 (in the case there was a shadowing interviewer) and includes lunch. On-site interview travel arrangements and reimbursements were handled by a contracted travel agency acting on behalf of Facebook. All my interviewers were very nice and professional. You will be hard pressed to find engineers with big egos here. The recruiters I worked with, on the other hand, mostly seemed like they had their act together.
I thought my interviews went well – each of my on-site interviewers complimented me on my solutions, so I was surprised when my recruiter emailed me that I did not get an offer.
Something fishy is definitely going on at Facebook. I am under the impression that their HR department is not completely honest with their candidates. If you sort the interviews by date on Glassdoor, you will notice that no one recently has been getting offers. I've been told by friends (inside and outside the company) that they thought Facebook wasn't even hiring anymore until the Fall... So I was definitely surprised when I was approached with the opportunity to interview with Facebook. I am at a loss of words after receiving my rejection despite the positive feedback my interviewers provided me. This experience has definitely deterred me from considering Facebook for future employment as it feels like I was brought through the process just so HR could justify their recruiting budget despite there being no job.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Candidates are required to sign an NDA preventing disclosure of questions.
Recruiter call was pretty standard, first round was 2 Meta tagged LC mediums in 45 minutes. On-site was 2 coding sessions of 2 LC mediums, a system design interview and a behavioral interview with an engineering manager.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How do you answer if someone asks how long a deliverable or project will take?
The entire process usually takes 3–8 weeks, depending on scheduling and the specific role. Coding interviews heavily emphasize common DSA topics such as arrays, strings, trees, graphs, BFS/DFS, heaps, hash maps, and dynamic programming. System design becomes increasingly important for E4+ positions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an array of integers and a target value, return the indices of two numbers that add up to the target
Unexpectedly, the first question in the technical round felt familiar. It was about finding a subset of strings with unique character concatenation — same problem I had worked through on PracHub a few days earlier. The interview included a recruiter screen followed by a rigorous pair of technical interviews where I tackled data structures and algorithms alongside system design concepts. After successfully answering a few more challenging DSA questions, I received an offer. The entire experience was intense but ultimately rewarding, and I happily accepted the position.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an array of strings, pick a subset whose concatenation contains no duplicate characters, and return the maximum possible length of that concatenation.