In Cheat Sheet, a regular series, the people who hire for some of the most sought-after jobs in the country explain exactly how they cull candidates and decide on the best ones. This week: Show Yelp you've experimented with its data if you want a shot at doing that for a living.
See all the cheat sheets here.
First Round:
Thirty-minute phone interview with a recruiter who checks that candidates have relevant technical knowledge and coding experience.
Second Round:
Phone interview with an engineering manager who assesses coding proficiency and aptitude for learning new languages. “As we grow, individual engineers will be able to pick and choose which languages their team uses.”
Third Round:
Four 45-minute interviews at the Yelp offices and a real-time coding test that’s completed on a whiteboard or coding pad.
The Score:
The recruiters and engineers who conducted the interviews decide together which candidate will make the cut, weighing technical skills most heavily but taking applicants’ personalities into account, too.
Do research the challenges of aggregating stream-of-consciousness narratives into readable data. “We like to see a candidate with a passion for what Yelp does specifically, which involves data that’s textually organized in long-form written reviews.”
Do play with Yelp’s API’s. “It’s not uncommon for people to have seen what sort of trends they can find through our data set. When we see someone who has used our data, we’re more interested in working with them.”
Do talk about your side gig. “Candidates who participate in other side projects really stand out. Our engineers are passionate about contributing to the open source community. Yelp has open-sourced 67 projects.”
Don’t pretend you know everything. “We love learning and have internal hackathons three times a year to encourage developers to collaborate with others and try something new.”
