Elemy Interview Questions
& Process

This was one of the worst processes I've been through. Initially, three people coordinated meetings with two interviewers. The main part was a take-home exercise due 24 hours before the final step, which I submitted. During the final meeting, the manager was nearly 10 minutes late and asked if I had submitted my exercise. I had spent hours preparing presentations and queries for it. It became clear then that I didn't want to work with that type of person. There are many other great tech companies, so I don't recommend Elemy.

It started with an unsolicited email and a recruiter call, where I learned about their $98M series A funding, a CAD$120k salary, and a remote-only culture. The first real test was a 1h 50m Codility take-home with three coding questions: CSS grid layout, React username/password input, and a string manipulation function. Eight days later, I had a 25-minute "cultural" interview with an engineer who spent most of the time making coffee. He asked about my "technology story" and Elemy's challenges, which he said was mainly hiring. He shared details about a major backend overhaul for their three apps, moving from individual Rust backends to a shared monolith. After a two-week pause where I seemed lost in their CRM, I had a system design interview with a frontend staff engineer. We discussed designing Twitter components and state management, with him showing screen captures. He also mentioned being busy with hiring. The next round was a proctored Codility test on JS promises and API responses, which I felt I bombed. This was immediately followed by a "product" interview. This interviewer asked HR-style questions and probed about my knowledge of business intelligence software and customer acquisition analytics, seeming to misunderstand my business model question. He compared Elemy to Uber for Autism therapy. Finally, I had the "Final Boss" interview. He focused on accountability for code, comparing Elemy's model to Uber again, and discussed backend challenges. He emphasized their focus on hiring in Canada and South America due to US developer costs and mentioned they had many open positions across different seniorities. He promised feedback within two days, but I ended up waiting 11 business days before emailing the recruiter, receiving a junior-level rejection. The whole process took seven weeks. My impression is a chaotic hiring process with candidates getting lost, a non-previewable product, and a constantly changing backend. They seem to prioritize LinkedIn profiles over resumes.

This whole process took about 2 months from start to finish, but then I got an automated email saying the position is no longer being filled. It started with one phone interview, then two separate Zoom interviews, then I had to do a case study and present it to a panel of 3 people. After the presentation, I waited a whole month to hear back and was pretty bummed to get an automated email instead of a human response, especially since I put in a lot of extra time and got good feedback. On the bright side, everyone I talked to on the Operations team was really nice.

This whole thing took about 4 and a half weeks, spanning Nov/Dec 2021. I had 5 or 6 interviews with 5 different people, and weirdly, they all asked the exact same questions. I went through the whole dang process, right up to the very end, thinking an offer was coming. They had me do a case study, which was pretty straightforward, but then they never even brought it up in discussion. Everyone gave me great feedback, saying I was exactly who they were looking for. Then, a week after my last interview, they emailed to say they had to check team numbers for the new quarter and couldn't hire anyone new in the meantime. All that after I spent a month of my time on it. They told me to email back in mid-January about openings, which I did, but got zero response. Absolutely terrible!