Bonfire Interview Questions
& Process

This company just ghosts you after the second round. No word from their team once I moved forward. It was very odd! You would expect them to at least give you an update on your status once you’ve moved past the first round.

I had 3 interview rounds with them, totaling about 4-5 hours of meetings, but they never responded, not even with a rejection. The technical interview was about 90 minutes. The interviewer was professional and knowledgeable, but seemed to want specific answers. I felt I gave the correct answer, but we'd spend 5 minutes until I phrased it how they wanted. For example, for the pros and cons of dependency injection, I first said we'd have to constantly create new object instances unless we used a singleton. After about 5 minutes, the answer they wanted was that we wouldn't have to write new all the time. Most questions went like that. Regardless, I spent 5 hours with them and never heard back.

So after I applied, they sent over some questions to get to know me better. Then, they hit me with more questions, specific to the role. They seemed pretty standard for this kind of job, like they wanted to see if I'd worked with digital products before and if I had some basic analytical skills. After that, there was a quick video interview, then an in-person chat with the department leaders, and finally, a chat with the engineering folks to see if I fit the job skills.

Shortly after I applied, I got an email from the co-founder, Kevin Penney. It had no subject line. The email contained 4 questions that I had to answer. Some of the questions were pretty wild, like guessing how many fluid ounces of craft beer are served in Richmond on a Saturday. At first, I thought it was a creative and quirky thing to do, which is what I expected from a startup like this. I've wanted to talk to someone from Bonfire for a while, so I decided to answer them. I spent a lot of time on these questions, days actually, over a weekend. Some of the questions, like the craft beer one, don't have clear answers. Even with sales numbers, which are hard to get, it would be a very rough estimate and take a lot of work. After spending days trying to talk to people and do research, I sent in my answers. Then, nothing. I emailed them a few days later to make sure they got my email. Still nothing. I emailed a third time and still no response. I haven't received a thank you, a confirmation, or a rejection email - nothing. It's not right to ask people to do so much work just to get an interview and then not respond at all. It tells me a lot about their workplace culture and how it might not be what I thought it was. If this is how they treat applicants, how do they treat employees?