Depop Interview Questions

Application

I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Depop (Los Angeles, CA (US)) in August 2019.

Interview

tl;dr- friendly staff & would highly recommend interviewing here, but they should tidy up their professionalism & maybe hire a recruiting coordinator

Phases were a video call, a 9-question test, 3 one-to-one onsite interviews, and lastly a hiring evening. Everyone was so friendly and welcoming at each stage. You can tell people truly loved Depop. Most employees were buyers & sellers on the app before they became employees. The majority of the interview questions I was asked were easy and relevant to the job. I actually wish they would’ve grilled me a little more.

But I think everyone's friendliness/casual nature started to be too much it felt disrespectful once I hit the onsite stage. One of the interviewers gave me a hug when the interview was finished (so, did I get the job?). A different interviewer admitted to not having my resume on hand, but when I offered her a hard copy, she actually turned it down. Gee, thanks. The same manager went on to talk to my forehead the whole time instead of my eyes which was distracting.

I was asked “Where are you from originally?” which is a big no-no. I was also asked what my zodiac sign was. Sure it was just friendly conversation, but are you going to make a hiring decision off that?

The onsite was scheduled a couple weeks in advance, but the day of the interview, the location was still TBD since they don’t have an LA office. Ninety minutes before our meeting, the invite still said "Sunset Boulevard” instead of an address. Pretty stressful.

After 2 interviews at the Depop space, I had to meet a manager for a 3rd interview at the Intelligencia in Silverlake, so I walked 4 blocks from the Depop space at 3pm on an unforgiving 90 degree day. I hadn’t met this manager, so I had to pick her out from the crowd which was awkward, and I went up to the wrong person first. We sat outdoors in the shade, but it was way too hot. We also didn't order any coffee drinks, and she never offered to buy one for me.

The hiring event was fun but too casual. Two of the women weren't wearing bras, and another woman's dress was so short, I saw her underwear. There was pizza offered and one of the girls said “I’m going balls to the wall” and grabbed the first piece. So you get the picture of how the night went. It was a very young, homogenous, group of people. Exclusively female.

Among 15 or so people, I couldn’t tell you who else was an applicant for the manager role and who was an applicant for the agent role since no one wore name tags, which annoyed me. I felt like I was in a psychology experiment which I didn’t enjoy. If you hated group projects in school, you won’t like this. Everyone clamored for the chance to speak first, and since easy questions were asked, there wasn’t much to elaborate on by the time it got to be your turn unless you wanted to cut someone off and steamroll the other applicants.

Application

I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Depop (London, England).

Interview

Was contacted by internal recruiter, expecting they knew what they looking for.

It was multi stage interview, spanning over weeks time: phone call, technical screening test on online platform and some hands on test during F2F phase. F2F interview on their premises partially were done over Zoom call with person not being in office that day.

Hands on test was completed but felt It was doing it in a way normally I would not do it. Test was mix of Terraform, Lambda, DynamoDB and Python.

Constantly trying put person outside of comfort zone, not really pleasant way of working. For some reason company apply same recruitment interviews to contractors, expecting them to work with them permanently.

Didn't received offer, reasoning for missing skills, which they never asked during interview process or conducting technical test. Felt like wasted some time, since initial contact to last message was over 2 weeks time. They should have mentioned this at very start, if it was critical for a job.

Application

I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Depop (London, England) in May 2020.

Interview

Reasonably quick and straight forward. I found the Hiring Manager to be very friendly and welcoming. The impression I got from the recruiter was that the core focus on the role was around workforce management & forecasting, but it seems the core focus for the role was outsourcing governance which I have limited experience in. This could have been worked out with a more rigorous screening process and clearer set expectations of the role. After my second stage interview, I received a generic rejection email and had to chase twice and wait nearly a fortnight to get feedback. All-in-all was a slightly incohesive interview process.

Application

I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Depop (London, England) in May 2020.

Interview

I was contacted by an internal recruiter who had found my CV on Hired.

Phone screen, then multiple stages with several people from different teams.
One stage was a presentation I had to create regarding an exercise pertinent to the role. I had ample time to do it, and it was actually a thoroughly enjoyable subject.

Everything moved at a fast speed, and I was kept informed of every step with good detail.
I have nothing to say about the whole process, everything and everyone felt very professional.

Application

I applied through a staffing agency. I interviewed at Depop.

Interview

Initial phone call, then take home tech test. After submitting my tech test I was told it had been received and i'd hear shortly. After 4 days I was told that someone else had just accepted the position.
I then asked for feedback for my tech test (3 emails now, no reply), it seems that the tech test wasn't even looked at. Really frustrating considering I sent the test back within 2.5 days. Feel like my time was wasted hugely

Application

I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Depop in March 2020.

Interview

Was head hunted by the in-house recruiter who then went awol. Could not get hold of her to follow up for the tele screening. Also reached out by email, LinkedIn but no answer.

Poor image of the company.

Application

I applied through an employee referral. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Depop in February 2020.

Interview

Overall, the process was handled very unprofessionally.

HR reached out to me over LinkedIn and said she'd set up a call to introduce the company. Since then, every time I responded it took her at least 10 days to reply.
During the actual interview (which I thought would be the intro session), it seemed the interviewer had not seen my CV or got any information about me, and most of the questions were missing the points.

I declined to continue the process in the end.

Application

I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Depop (London, England) in February 2020.

Interview

x1 hr pairing
- break with a go or no-go decision if you didn't do too well in the first stage
x1 hr technical discussions
x 0.5hr culture fit

Felt good about the test and the developers who I was going to work with were great to pair with - I blanked on a basic percentage check but was able to roll through it and complete the task... all down to the professional and chill manner of the devs.

The other stages are just general questions, ascertaining how you'd fit into the team, what your strengths and assets are etc. I consider myself a pretty honest and outgoing person, so that's why I was surprised at the feedback.

There were some slip-ups on my part, but I felt were justified and I was given the impression that I had recovered from them... but apparently not.

The feedback afterwards I had to ask for after the classic: "you're not right for this role", and even then, it was dreadful. No positives, only badly contextualised negatives.

Example:
When have you made a mistake and what would you do differently?

My answer:
I didn't rely on testing in a previous job ages ago, did the regression testing myself and didn't think to give it to a colleague to look over because there was a tight mvp and I just wanted to get it done since there had already been a lot of scope-creep. When it went down I was the first one to take responsibility and fix the problem.
What I would do differently would have been to make sure it was fully tested, peer reviewed etc.

Their feedback:
He said there was a lack of other processes and did not actually take ownership of the mistake.

There were tonnes of examples like this.

Ultimately, 3 hour interviews are nerve-racking, and you're not going to get to know someone in that time, but their vague questions might be there to trick you out... it felt very natural at the time to openly talk about things, and be ok to jet off in tangents if the flow takes you... but apparently not. I'm a senior engineer in my current role, even going for Lead positions and have had good feedback.

 A very confusing and disingenuous process.

Application

I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Depop (London, England).

Interview

After a brief call with a recruiter and a coding test, we arranged a face-to-face interview on Monday. Finally, they canceled the interview three days before (Friday) saying that they no longer recruit for that position.

Application

I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Depop (London, England) in June 2019.

Interview

They contacted me to apply for a Data Scientist position. After telling them that I am more suitable for a junior data scientist, they told me to apply for that role. I applied online, had a 15 min HR call and did an online exam (Logic, Devops, RegExp, SQL). After the technical exam I got invited for a first f2f with the lead Data scientist. After that I got invited for a 2nd f2f with 2 software engineers. This is where it gets tricky. Not sure what they were testing but I guess communication. I had to write code in front of them, with basically no instructions. So I had to communicate with them to try to understand what they wanted. They were terrible at explaining it (almost pretending, that I should know what to write). At the end I got to do what they wanted and they didn't seem to complain with how it all went. The programming itself was simple enough: some python functions, with arrays and dictionaries. Basically a case study.
All I know is that after this interview I was told that they will not proceed with my application.