Overall great experience with Glassdoor and the 4 step interview process.
1. Introduction phone interview. From the very beginning the internal recruiter was very open and encouraging. She laid out what to expect and showed interest in my own expectations and goals.
2. Karat technical assessment. After the phone screen was a technical interview with a third party interview platform, Karat. Over a recorded video conference with another engineer, I was asked a few open ended questions about React and JS. We then proceeded to work and talk through a technical coding challenge over a shared screen that had multiple iterations. I heard back from the internal recruiter who then helped set up the next interview and also provided the team's feedback on the recorded Karat interview. No other company I had interviewed with up that point had offered feedback so freely. It was refreshing and helpful. She also gave me a heads up on what I would most likely be tested on with the next technical interview, namely CSS.
3. Technical interview with internal engineer. Great opportunity to talk with someone I would be working with at Glassdoor. It was easy to work with this person on the technical challenge, as they were curious about my approach and reasoning behind certain decisions that I was making. It gave me a sense of the culture at Glassdoor in working with the other engineers.
4. Onsite interviews. The 5 hour onsite included multiple rounds of technical and behavioral interviews. Many of the technical interviews focused on open-ended, practical, white-boarding scenarios on topics such as web layout, React component design, and data fetching. While I am confident in my programming capabilities, I appreciated that at no point was I expected to whiteboard perfect code, they were mostly concerned with my approach and reasons for each decision. Each interviewer was easy to work with and eager to answer any questions that I had for them about working at Glassdoor. I was able to eat lunch with several of the team that I would be hired to work with, which was an excellent opportunity to talk about tech interests, Glassdoor culture, and get a feel for the general team vibes and excitement that they had for the product they were working on. The interview with the Product Manager was also very insightful into the product vision and was mostly focused on my experience working with others, challenges that I have faced, and how I have overcome them.
At the end of the day, I had come away from the experience confident that I had been given a a great opportunity to show my strengths and how I could be a good fit for the team, while at the same time, having learned quite a bit from all of the interviewers whenever there was any knowledge gaps. I really got a feel for how Glassdoor encourages learning and collaboration within teams and across the organization.
Follow-up: The internal recruiter was very communicative and set expectations about when I would hear back and what an offer might include. She followed through in a very timely manner (1 business day) with feedback and an offer! No unpleasant surprises, thorough details, and a reasonable time frame for my response.