I applied through a staffing agency. I interviewed at Hopin (London, England) in Oct 2022
Interview
Call with recruiter. Recruiter was very rude, Was looking away all the time during the interview, not being interested in anything that is being said, very immature behaviour. Said he will let me know what the outcome is, and of course, as expected after that behaviour, did not.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What is your salary expectation?
When answered (it was a normal salary expectation, more on the lower level), he asked me what makes me think I deserved that?
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Hopin (London, England) in Apr 2021
Interview
I was approached by Hopin about the position.
The recruiter spoke of himself as if he were an external employee to the company, even though he was working internally which showed an impersonal view of the working and culture within, in addition to no information about structure of teams or high level overview of the way teams work. Hopin pride themselves in the super-fast growth to hundreds of employees within a year and the fact that they've acquired a lot of other companies too. In my experience with startups this is often the demise of any culture or shared values within teams that drive motivation over the long term. Back to the process - the next stage was an average engineering interview, where the interviewer jumped right into the task without much intro to himself/the teams (other than stating his role) or more importantly without any insight into Hopin itself. The whole session was very one-sided - only focusing on me, where the interviewer went quiet for 99% of the time, which was not a good signal of willingness for communication, collaboration or discussion, clearly no interest in the way you think as an engineer either as no exploratory questions were asked. This is something I like to test and I have to say Hopin did not impress with - interviews are as much about getting to know the interviewee as they are about the interviewer/team/company. I stopped the interviews at that point. Communication with the company was slow, there was no care shown for the candidate, you're just one of the lot if you proceed to interview and accept an offer.
Impressions:
From what I gathered early on, in terms of building the product, there seems to be a shortage of designers, which makes me question the quality of handover to engineering at the pace of fast growth and churning features. Another negative was that it appears engineers are not involved in stages other than the coding, which in my experience has proven to lead to shallow, quantity over quality type of feature work, in conveyor belt style leading to a lot of tech debt. Although the company lists flexibility of working hours as a benefit, it was highlighted that you may indeed end up working long hours due to the the fast growth they strive for if you are not strict about your working hours. In engineering, that means that you can hardly compete climbing the ladder if the guy/girl next to you is putting in 11h a day. They do not provide any feedback when asked, which is an indicator of the same translating in their culture.
Positives: the product solves a real problem in the current times and is getting more and more traction. They clearly have some talented people also working for the company.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Tell me about yourself? Which programming language do you prefer?
Thank you for taking the time to review us, and we appreciate your thoughtfulness in this feedback. We're sorry the interviews felt one-sided and communication didn't feel top notch. We've recently implemented a new interview training for all interviewers in order to make sure everyone has a great experience with us. We have also taken your feedback to our recruiters as well as our engineering leads, so we can review our interview process. We're always looking to improve to create a better candidate experience.
I applied through other source. I interviewed at Hopin (San Francisco, CA) in Apr 2021
Interview
Some guy from Hopin contacted me on Hired. Set up an early morning interview. He emails me five minutes before it starts asking to reschedule. He does not understand how to reschedule. After he figures it out he schedules another ridiculously early morning interview. He's over ten minutes late then starts emailing me asking why I'm not clamoring to talk to him again.
Just in case you still have some irrational amount of hope in Hopin, note that they are a UK company and provide nothing in the way of health insurance.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Can you figure out when I'm actually going to get around to calling you?
Thank you for taking the time to review us. We're sorry to hear you had a negative experience with scheduling and tardiness. We made sure to take your feedback to the team and are dedicated to improving. While we do provide healthcare benefits in the US, our new Total Rewards team is always looking at adding and expanding our benefits across the globe.
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