I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Meta in Jun 2013
Interview
I was introduced to a technical recruiter while I was visiting a friend at the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park. I received a preliminary email to set up a screening call two days later. The screening call was 45 mins long and focused on my background and previous experience. The recruiter was very polite and efficient. At the end of the interview the recruiter asked me to send her my availabilities for a preliminary phone interview.
The initial phone interview was setup for two weeks later and involved 2, 45-minute interviews with two different Facebook product managers. The recruiter called me a couple of hours before to tell me the first interview was to focus on "vision" and the second to focus on "analytics".
The product managers I spoke to were both polite and quite efficient. After some pleasantries we got into the first real question which was "Choose a technology you are particularly excited about and why". Then the interviewer asked me to talk about the disadvantages of the new technology and it's potential negative effects. The third question was about how this new technology could be integrated into a Facebook product. This part was tricky because I had chose a technology that would be difficult to integrate into Facebook products given their challenges with privacy issues. I felt the interview when well and I was confident in my answers but I would like to have chosen a technology that was a more natural fit with Facebook's current products.
The second phone interview took place right after the first and focused on analytics. "You are the PM of the Facebook timeline - how would you measure retention?". My background is with small startups and I could tell right away that the interviewer didn't like my answers as he kept asking the same question in a different way. I felt that I answered the questions well but the interview ended 5 mins early and I was not asked for a follow up on-site interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
You are the PM of the Facebook timeline - how would you measure retention?
I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Jun 2013
Interview
Applied online and contacted by recruiter through email a week afterwards and set up phone interview. Before we talked I sent her an email to confirm our call. She replied very shortly and told me that we had already discussed that and to re-read our emails.
When she did call, she immediately started the conversation by saying she didn't have much time to talk which was off putting b/c we specifically chose this time for the interview. Not a conversation at all, felt like I was talking to a robot. Set up another interview for two weeks later b/c she had a work trip the following week and couldn't talk then (which was a total cop out)
Talked to her again for the second phone interview. Not receptive at all. When I told her about my future plans for Facebook she said it wasn't much different from what they have now. (It is, but she was apparently expecting more than my already unconventional ideas).
A week and a half went by with no contact. I emailed her to check in and told me to re-apply the next year. No feedback on why I wasn't selected.
I really don't know why she even contacted me to begin with. Seems like she made up her mind that she wasn't going to hire me from the moment she sent the first snarky email. She was uninformative and unprofessional, rushing our conversations and delaying our contact.
Overall, inauthentic experience with a company of such caliber.