I applied online. The process took 2+ months. I interviewed at Zillow (Irvine, CA) in Aug 2019
Interview
Terrible and incompetent recruiters. I decided to not proceed with Zillow at all.
Just to give you background for the further story - I'm a Principal SWE at a public software development company located in Silicon Beach, 15 years of experience. Definitely not a person, who would expect the attitude described below.
I got interested in Zillow Offers' SSWE position in Irvine, so I contacted their NA Recruiting Lead and she suggested two ladies to reach out, as she was on a maternity leave. I chose one person randomly, and since then the whole process was botched and just a waste of time.
The lady scheduled a call, was asking lot of questions, at the end told me that the position I told her about (in advance before the call!) was not under her responsibility, so she would ask that other recruiting lady to call me. I definitely applaud this recruiter - she organized a very "professional" and useless phone call.
That second recruiting lady never called. I tried to contact her myself - she never responded. The resume I uploaded to their system went to nowhere. So I just forgot about Zillow. That was beginning of August 2019.
Out of the blue in October 2019 I was suddenly contacted by their new recruiter. Got a standard flattering email telling that my experience "aligns perfectly" with their open position. LOL! When I responded to the recruiter, he said that he didn't actually knew that I applied two months before that. It took him a while to find my application. And he told me some nonsense - that indeed there was my resume received on September 17th (omg, what a lie - I actually applied in August) - and the only reason I was not contacted is because that second recruiting lady was currently on a vacation - so probably she didn't see the application (seems like very "professional" lie again).
Then it took several days for him just to schedule a phone call - and then he didn't actually call at that time. I was already laughing at Zillow recruiting department, this case added more laughs :) Anyway, I accepted his apologies, and we indeed had a phone call in a couple of days – the recruiter gathered same (!) information as the first lady, promised to arrange me a call with the hiring manager. Needless to say that it never happened - he never called/messaged back.
Well, I saw imperfect recruiters before. But seems like Zillow decided to say "hold my beer, bro" and show how a really disorganized recruiting process might look like. Good job - you nailed it, Zillow!
Good morning, thank you for taking the time to leave a review. I am truly sorry that your experience with our recruiting team was frustrating. We pride ourselves on candidate experience and it is clear that we missed the mark here. Moving forward we will ensure to take extra measures so our mistakes are not repeated. Please accept my apologies and reach out to me directly if you'd like to discuss anything further. -Annie Rihn, annie@zillowgroup.com