Square Interview Questions

Application

I applied online. I interviewed at Square.

Interview

This company asks the year you graduated from college in order to discriminate against people over a certain age. Their job application requires you to add your college graduation year so that they can calculate your age and discriminate against you.

Application

I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 days. I interviewed at Square.

Interview

Has no complaints about process itself, the 30 min screening interview followed by technical interview conducted via CoderPad. The task was to implement miniscript language. Couple example of statements given. When this statements pass tests, interviewer adds different kind of statements to language and ask to modify your program to handle them too. This is really standard task in computer industry, I've done it many times on the job and there is whole theory and set of tools (parsers) which programmer typically use in practice. However since this is a CodePad - you cannot use third parties libraries. The standard way to solve such kind of tasks is to have a grammar, break down input into tokens and then apply parser. Since the only time you have at your disposal is 45 min, some steps needs to be hacked, so for lexical parsing I used regular expressions and for grammar parser - just branching logic based on first token. The interesting question is what kind of skills company trying to verify with this sort of test? How to solve standard task in very strict time constraints? The task is trivial itself, but all experience made me think company looking for hackers rather than engineers. I am going to skip on further interviewing with Square regardless of interview results which are not known to me yet.

Application

I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Square (San Francisco, CA (US)) in March 2020.

Interview

In broad strokes: the process began with a phone screen. After that, there were two separate CoderPad pair programming interviews. After that was a "virtual onsite" (given the ongoing Coronavirus shelter-in-place order), which had three more pair coding sessions (two more CoderPad algorithms questions, and a JavaScript CodePen visualization question), a session to discuss recent past projects, and a system design question session with the type of system given ahead of time.

After the on-site, I was told that under normal circumstances, I would be placed, but that due to the economic downturn from the Coronavirus, Square was closing out most of its existing positions without filling them. The recruiter told me my hypothetical leveling and mentioned that I may still be able to get a placement in the near future if the economy bounces back and new postings go up, and I haven't actually gotten a formal "no" besides that discussion. It's a bit disappointing, but understandable given their small business customer base and the extraordinary times. I'd definitely apply again under normal circumstances.

Application

I applied online. The process took 4+ weeks. I interviewed at Square (Portland, OR (US)) in March 2020.

Interview

Three-round interview process. Took a little over one month from start to finish. I applied online and heard back within two days of my application. First round with the recruiter, second round with the hiring manager, third round onsite consisting of four 1o1 interviews with the team. Received feedback exactly one week from the final interview.

It was definitely a hard interview but a very pleasant experience. The entire team was very nice. If you are preparing for a similar interview, definitely think of as many stories as you can and be able to tell specific examples. They ask a lot of situational questions. I wish I could remember more of the questions to provide on here!

Application

I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Square.

Interview

Honestly the interview process itself was fairly smooth, but they ultimately leveled down the role before a final round, which I understand is a business decision at the end of the day but was still quite disappointing in terms of how it was handled. I think at this level of role, there's a hope that there's a mutual respect between candidate and employer and this just didn't seem too professional in my opinion given the time put into the process.

Application

I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Square (Atlanta, GA (US)).

Interview

This was the most disappointing interview experience I have ever had.
I was contacted by a Recruiting Coordinator and she set up a 30 min phone screen. She answered every question but couldn’t tell me a salary which was weird, but I figured it would be addressed in the coming interviews.
Next round was a writing sample, easy. Used to see how I would communicate with candidates and internals.
Last was an on-site. This is where it all went completely wrong. The two internal recruiters were completely out of touch. The first, insulted where I was from the entire time. Didn’t even talk about the role, just kept saying how much he hated me home state! He was NOT into me or my answers after that.
The second recruiter kept asking me how I dealt with conflict and even went as far as to tell me to “put my big girl panties on” when I said I don’t enjoy it in the workplace. Super inappropriate! She was late to come in, sped through the questions, and left before the time was up. She didn’t listen to anything I was saying and made me feel very unimportant.
Finally, I met the recruiter over the role. She was SO uninterested in speaking with me, had no salary insight (again), and when it came down to the end I had emailed her AND the recruiting coordinator so many times looking for answers but NO ONE would return an email.
The final nail in the coffin was the recruiter calling from a blocked number and leaving a 15 second voicemail saying someone else got the role. I have never been treated like this by any organization and hope everyone reading this knows what they’re in for before interviewing.

Application

I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Square.

Interview

I spoke with the recruiter, Ilana, who is amazing by the way, and was told that due to the hiring team being offsite that there may be a delay in reaching back out to schedule an on-site, which is understandable. I received a standard email template stating that they decided not to move onward but never spoke with anyone from the hiring team. It was really hard to gauge where I could've improved when I never even spoke with anyone from the sales team. To say the least, I'm very disappointed in the lack of communication from the sales team when I know the recruited liked everything I had to say. I do not feel that I was given a fair chance in the interview process.

Application

I applied online. The process took 4+ weeks. I interviewed at Square.

Interview

The person who interviewed me was completely clueless about the job and the department. I literally spoke to them for 5 minutes on the phone and when I asked questions, the recruiter could not answer any of ,my questions. That's pretty sad considering this recruiter was a "senior" recruiter. The lack of communication and getting back to me still hasn't happened. I'm still sitting here waiting for some sort of answer and as a typical recruiter loves to do, ignores emails and doesn't email me back. The recruiter even called and when I called back never called back. As the saying goes, never judge a book by it's cover, but judging the way that this company recruits, I would say, why would someone ever want to work here with the poor recruiting job that they do. Don't even waste your time.

Interview

I had an initial phone screen with the business recruiter who seemed very low-energy and disinterested, even though she was the one who reached out to me. As many other reviews have noted, candidate experience isn't a priority at Square. I did not get a response or even a rejection after my call.

Application

The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Square.

Interview

I interviewed with a Square Recruiter and the questions were pretty basic for the position. The Recruiter was very impressed with my back ground and even told me there were many positions that would fit. She said she was definitely passing me forward for the next step face to face interview. She told me the start date they were looking at as well. I never heard a thing back, even after emailing the Recruiter. I have heard from many people that Square only hires young people so I am seriously questioning this companies values. Looks like I dodged a bullet. Sill very disappointing.