Tripadvisor Interview Questions
& Process

So, I applied and a recruiter reached out. She wanted to set up a meeting and I gave her my availability. She didn't send an invite though, so I wasn't sure if it was actually happening. I followed up with an email, but she never replied. Turns out she was on vacation and didn't think emailing me about it was worth it. On the day of the meeting, she was late and didn't even say sorry. Anyway, the initial call went okay, and I moved on to a video call with the hiring manager. That lasted about 45 minutes, and at the end they said the recruiter would be in touch soon. Well, 3.5 months later, still nothing. I emailed the recruiter twice and sent a LinkedIn message, no response. I even messaged the hiring manager on LinkedIn, still no reply. It was super disappointing and unprofessional how they just ghosted me. Really made the company look bad and disorganized.

We kicked off with a technical assessment, which was basically a coding challenge to check out your programming skills and how you solve problems. Then there were a few rounds of technical interviews where we really dove deep into AI, NLP, and system design stuff with the Data Science and ML Team. After that, we had some behavioral interviews to get a feel for your past experiences, how you work in a team, and your communication style. Finally, there was a meeting with senior leadership or the hiring manager to chat about your fit, what you're looking for, and what cool projects you might work on.

The interviews themselves were pretty standard, starting with a recruiter screen and then moving on to meetings with the hiring manager and other team members. Everyone I spoke with was nice and asked good questions. What wasn't great was how slow things moved and how little communication there was. It took anywhere from a week to 3.5 weeks between interviews, with an average of 2.5 weeks. Most of that time, I had no idea what was happening with my application. Three times, I was only told on the day of the interview that they couldn't make it and we'd have to reschedule (one time I was already waiting in the virtual room). I interviewed for two similar jobs. For the first one, I talked to 5 people over 8.5 weeks, but then they told me they paused hiring. For the second, I met with 6 people over 7 weeks, but I decided to take another job offer during that time.

Scheduling the interviews was tough and the whole thing took about 2 months. It started with an HR chat about the hiring process. There were 5 interviews in total: 1 HR, 3 technical, and 1 manager interview. I made it through the first of the three technical interviews. The first technical interview was straightforward, involving a simple coding task to create a multiplication table for two inputs, along with questions on data structures and SQL. I finished all the tasks within the allotted time. Two weeks later, I had the second technical interview. It featured an easy LeetCode problem, 'Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock.' I found it a bit challenging to come up with the optimal solution but managed to solve it with a hint. The other part involved finding errors in some Javascript code. Unfortunately, I didn't pass because I needed a hint for the first problem, missed a typo while debugging the Javascript code, and was too slow overall, even though the interviewer said everything was okay at the time and I finished before the deadline. I should have double-checked my work more carefully.