I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 days. I interviewed at Yelp (San Francisco, CA) in Jul 2012
Interview
A few months ago, I was contacted by a staffing firm that works directly with Yelp to fill positions in various teams. I quickly responded, expressing my interest. The staffing agent who initially contacted me referred me to her boss, who was an extremely nice lady who works out of her home. She did initial questions like what kinds of things I’m interested in, can I relocate, etc. Mostly, she told me about the team that she is looking for.
The Yelp staffer talked to me first on the phone, about my projects, goals, Yelp team, and how interested I was. He then setup a phone screen with the development lead of the team I was interviewing for, which was to take place about a week later. This phone call was postponed because of a meeting at Microsoft, and I actually did it a few days later than planned. No big deal for me, though it was a little hectic because family was visiting and I didn’t want to discuss my interviewing with them at this point.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
We started with a little chit-chat, then he asked me about my current projects at GeoEye. He did go into technical details, but not too much. He asked me about my opinion on testing and other software engineering practices. I discussed unit testing and the efforts I had made to impose best practices in my current team. I was pretty emphatic in my description of software engineering practices, since I had seen such dramatic benefits in my work. We had a pretty good discussion about this sort of stuff and I felt like I was being taken seriously because of my experience. We also talked about working in teams.