I applied online. I interviewed at Meta in Apr 2017
No offer
Negative experience
Average interview
Application
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 months. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Mar 2013
Interview
I applied online sometime in December. Basically you can just submit your Facebook profile and a resume.
A recruiter contacted me through LinkedIn in mid-December and seemed unaware that I had applied for the job but wanted to talk to me. I told her my availability and did not hear back from her.
I missed a call from the recruiter the first week of January. Apparently she had sent me a message that I never received scheduling our interview for that time and date. I then had a lot of difficulty getting a message back to her and thought it must have had to do with some problem with the LinkedIn messaging system. Eventually I had an interview with the recruiter that was a pretty basic HR screening interview.
After that I had a phone interview with a UX Researcher. Actually, we had the same mysterious difficulty in which she had supposedly sent me a message scheduling the interview that I did not receive, and I missed the first call from the UX Researcher. (I really looked into every possibility and don't see how it could have been any problem on my end, which was really frustrating). We cleared it up and had it the next week. The interviewer was driving a car during the interview...
After that I had another phone interview with a different UX Researcher who was a little tougher.
I was then scheduled for an on-site visit at the beginning of March. A recruiter called me the day before my trip and mentioned that I would be doing a mock user test before the three interviews I had already been informed of.
At the beginning of the visit, I had 15 minutes to prepare for the mock user test, and then was led to a room to conduct the test while a room full of UX Researchers observed through a mirrored window. I was kind of anxious to get through it and get to the interviews I had spent most of my time preparing for, but I thought it went fine enough. Afterwards we had a short discussion about the test, then I had lunch with the recruiter.
After lunch the recruiter left me alone for a few minutes, then came back to inform me that we weren't going to continue the interview because I had missed a lot of opportunities in the user test.
Hmm... OK.
Overall it wasn't a terrible experience, but I really feel that *they* may be missing a lot of opportunities in the way they are recruiting.
The emphasis on moderating tests wasn't clear at any point of the process and was not even emphasized when the on-site visit was scheduled. If it had been, I certainly would have been more prepared for that particular aspect of the visit. Regardless, I don't see how those 15 minutes could have indicated to them that I would not be able to moderate tests in whatever the ideal Facebook approach to moderating tests is. I kind of suspect that there is something else they are looking at - or maybe they just didn't like the look of me.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
One of the UX researchers asked me to describe a compliment and a criticism that had most impacted the way I work.
I applied online. A recruiter contacted me after three weeks . The first interview with the recruiter is very nice. Most of the questions were "HR questions" such as "Are you willing to relocate?" "When will you be available?" She also asked me to talk a little bit about myself, why I am interested in this position, and so on. She introduced the program and the team to me. One week after this phone screening, she emailed me and set up an interview for me with a UX researcher at Facebook.
My second interview was a very bad experience. I was told it would be a video conference interview and they even provided me a "testing channel", so I prepared accordingly. However, at the interview, the interviewer did not turn on her camera, but I had already turned on mine, so she could see me, I could not see her but I could see myself. It was just very unnatural and uncomfortable. The worse thing was that this interviewer had not read my resume at all. I could absolutely tell that for the questions she asked. She kept asking me to give examples in my previous work/experience where I blablabla (they were not behavioral-based questions). Then she asked "Give me an example where you used the research method you are best at and made a great contribution to the whole project." I would say this question did not apply to me at all. First, I was still in school, I did not have much work experience. Second, the position I applied for is called "UX research associate" and it is basically still a training program (as described in the JD).
The recruiter told me they had decided to move forward with other candidates about three weeks after that interview.