THE zoom INTERVIEW
Looking to land a job at Zoom but don’t know what the process looks like?
Well, you’ve come to the right place. Detailed in this post is a look at the timeline of the interview process, preparation guidelines, and what's different or unique about Zoom's interview process as opposed to other tech companies.
THE zoom INTERVIEW explained
BACKGROUND
Zoom was created in 2011, and since then, has seen some incredible growth. Seems like nowadays you can’t join a meeting without receiving a zoom link. And because of the whole work from home scene, companies have adopted Zoom in order to keep their teams aligned.
The engineers at Zoom have created a product that people love and they are committed to their mission: Make video communications frictionless and secure while empowering people to accomplish more.
So what does the Zoom interview look like? Keep reading for a detailed outline of the interviews you can expect.
BEFORE THE INTERVIEW
update your RESUME
Make sure you’ve updated your resume and in particular your LinkedIn profile; use deliverables and metrics when you can as they are concrete examples of what you’ve accomplished. Make sure to be as specific as possible.
PREPARATION
Here is our guide on how to prepare for the coding interview with a 12-week plan.
CHOOSING YOUR LANGUAGE
Zoom does not require that you know any specific programming language before interviewing for a tech position. However, you should be familiar with the syntax of your preferred language such as Java, Python, C#, C/C++. You should also know some of the languages’ nuances, such as how memory management works, or the most commonly used collections, libraries, etc. Choose one you’re most comfortable with and stick to it.
screen with recruiter
After reviewing your resume, you’ll be paired with a recruiter who will be your guide through the interview process at Zoom. This will be a 30 minute conversation. They may ask you about why you want to work for Zoom, what your past experiences are, and what technologies you are comfortable with.
It’s important to remember that in this interview, the recruiter is trying to make sure that you are genuinely interested in the position and that you are qualified to do so.
1-on-1 Technical screen
If you make it past the recruiter stage, you end up getting a 1-on-1 technical screening interview which should last about one hour.
Here you will be given an algorithm and data structure question and will be asked to solve within the allotted time. You can expect such questions as:
Reverse the second half of a linked list
Find all anagrams in a string
Merge overlapping intervals
Whereas a lot of companies will just give you a coding problem and say "go", at Zoom, the engineer interviewing you is there to help you find the solution. They will guide you to the correct answer, as they understand the interview process is more about if they can work with you, not if you can solve a random coding question in an hour.
To see the 15 most commonly asked question in an Zoom interview, click below:
ON-site interview
Coding Rounds (2)
Be prepared to face a couple coding rounds in your onsite interview. You should study as many data structures and algorithms as possible in order to increase your chances.
Ideally, Zoom wants you to complete the problem and all associated subproblems successfully without any help from the interviewer. However, you should keep the interviewer informed about what you are trying to accomplish by describing key decision steps while answering a question.
Here are some examples:
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“We can use a stack for this solution because…”
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“We can use an in-order tree traversal for this question because…”
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“I may have missed some edge cases, let me take a closer look at my solution.”
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“I can think of a solution in O(N2) time doing X, but I think we can have a linear solution here. I’d like to take a minute to think through an approach.”
System Design
This will be more of a discussion between you and the interviewer, where you will be asked to design a system that can scale. Typical questions include:
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Design a TinyURL
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Design Facebook Newsfeed
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Design Instagram
For example, here are some things you should keep in mind as you think about designing Instagram:
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What is Instagram?
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Requirements and Goals of the System
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Some Design Considerations
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Capacity Estimation and Constraints
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High Level System Design
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Database Schema
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Data Size Estimation
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Component Design
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Reliability and Redundancy
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Data Sharding
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Ranking and News Feed Generation
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News Feed Creation with Sharded Data
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Cache and Load balancing
Hiring Manager
Be prepared to talk about past projects, their impact, and what problems and solutions you faced. For interviews like this, it's encouraged to follow the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result). This will present the interviewer with a solid understanding of how you work and what types of problems you faced.
This is also a good time to get a feeling for what Zoom is working on and what the team looks like. It's best to come with a list of questions you plan on asking as it's also a time for you to interview them.
THE OFFER / NO offer
From on-site to offer will take about another week or two. This is so management can either evaluate other candidates or to draft up your offer letter along with other logistics.
In the event that you don’t receive an offer, you’ll most likely have to wait six months to a year to re-apply. Don’t expect any feedback after your interview, but you can conclude that you either didn’t have enough experience or that it just wasn’t a fit culturally.
If you do receive a job offer, the hiring manager will call you to discuss salary, start date, etc. For more information on how to negotiate your salary visit the following link:
what's different
Take home test
Where most take home tests focus on HackerRank style questions, the Zoom test is a little more unique where you’ll have to work with API calls and data manipulation.
Need help preparing for the interview?
Check out the Definitive Interview Prep Roadmap,
written and reviewed by real hiring managers.