I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Toptal (New York, NY) in July 2022
Interview
Reached out to by sourcer on LinkedIn. Set up a time to speak with the recruiter a few days later. The recruiter never called. A few days later, the recruiter followed up and said they extended an offer to a candidate (for a different role then the one I was interviewing for), and canceled the ‘upcoming’ interview that had already passed. Suboptimal candidate experience.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Toptal (Bogotá, Bogota) in Sept 2022
Interview
Beware, they are not trying to hire for the position, they just want you to deliver expertise for free so they can train their two managers. They'll come up with ANY excuse to close the process once you've trained their very junior managers on how to do stuff.
An initial super friendly "we are super awesome" kind of interview with the recruiter.
Then a business case they call "technical assessment". You're given a couple of datasets and a couple of days to understand the problem, process the data and deliver an executive presentation. The case has questions that can´t be answer with the data. I came up with sophisticated solutions I had to work on. An executive presentation to answer 7 rather complex marketing analytics questions for which there's no data is absolutely irrational. No executive presentation requires 7 complex answers in real life.... I thought they were confused.
Next thing I got is an email telling me the managers (yeah, the people I would lead) were going to assess me in real time, looking how I coded, how I thought and I would then justiy my credentials to them.
I found this disrespectful and irrational and so I declined the interview invite, to which they replied with "you're out of the process".
I have grown teams from 7 people to 40 people and I know the fact that a junior decides if a Director is hired or not is absolutely unnatural and should rise red flags, specially if you never talk to your potential boss beforehand.
To be honest, I couldn't care less. This leaves me the impression this is a horrible place to work at and that I was fortunate I didn't work there.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
First interview is all roses and rainbows... "tell me about your experience", "you're amazing", "we're amazing", "let's get you to deliver some specialized free work for us to see if you are who you say you are".
Then comes the "technical test" which can't be answered with the data you get, I even felt like providing an answer was a bit irresponsible.
Then comes the assessment what your reports do to you in real time to see if they think you code well or not.
I was supposed to have an additional 3 interviews after that, god knows what would they be daring to ask....
I applied online. The process took 2 days. I interviewed at Toptal
Interview
I don't think they even wanted to hire anyone for this position. Most probably they are wasting everyone's time and gathering data.
Companies like these should be banned to hire any employees.
The HR coordinator appeared to be super friendly, and he even offered to setup time for feedback after I was rejected. And guess what in the feedback sessions, he came and said "I do not have more details".
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Asked to solve a case study.
Since I work on these problems everyday, i gave them the solution in first 2 minutes. But the Analyst wanted me to provide all the steps. So, we went step-by-step!!
All my answers were correct and still I wasn't hired!!!