Unqork Interview Questions
& Process

It took about 3 weeks to interview here and I had 7 interviews total. The recruiter was great and kept me updated the whole time. First was a 30 min call with the recruiter. Then a video call with the hiring manager to go over a case study. After that was a portfolio presentation to 5 people. The last 4 interviews were 30 min one-on-one chats with the people who were at the presentation. Everyone at Unqork was super friendly and knew their stuff, making the whole thing feel pretty chill.

A recruiter reached out and invited me to an onsite interview. I tried to learn more about the product beforehand, but they suggested we cover it during the onsite. I was told there would be 4 rounds. The first interviewer's opening question was "Why do you want to work at Unqork?" I was a bit surprised because my honest answer was, "I'm not sure if I do yet." Nobody seemed to know what my role would entail, and I didn't get much product insight. The process was disorganized, with one interviewer canceling. It felt like they had never interviewed anyone before. To top it off, a week later, my current manager mentioned he heard I interviewed at Unqork, showing a lack of discretion. It was a mess.

The interview process kicked off with a standard phone screening, followed by a peer phone interview. Then came a lengthy 6-person panel interview that pretty much took up the whole day. I was initially told I'd hear back the same day. After two weeks of radio silence, I was informed that an offer would have been extended, but hiring was put on hold. They mentioned they'd reconnect once the freeze was lifted. A month passed, the freeze ended, and it turned out Unqork had restructured, with only the insurance sector remaining. I was then told an offer was imminent, within 24 hours, now that hiring was back on. But then, I was told there was one more interview, just a casual chat with someone from the insurance team. After that last chat, I was unfortunately ghosted. No follow-up, and definitely no offer as previously suggested. Quite the experience.

It was a really bad interview experience. The HR people were nice, but the engineers seemed terrible at managing the process. The first round was a 30-minute phone technical screening with a team lead who went over my experience with things they cared about. The second round was a take-home exercise. I used Google to find some solutions and customized them to create a final solution I was happy with. They didn't move forward with my application, saying I copied code from online without citing it, which I thought was ridiculous. They never said I couldn't Google or that I needed to cite my sources. It was a take-home exercise, so I expected that Googling and copy-pasting would be part of it. If they really cared about how a candidate solves a problem, they should have set up a one-on-one live pair programming session. What was worse is that the task required interacting with AWS, but they didn't provide any resources. I had to run my code in my own account, which cost me money. I think this shows they don't pay attention to details and don't care about the candidates. I did not have a pleasant interview experience. It seems like they don't have solid standards and don't know what they want.