Absolutely a horrible recruiter and experience. The process has taken five months.

I initially spoke with a recruiter in April. He was super cheery and said he was in charge of recruiting for FE engineers. However, he consistently ghosted me after each round of interviews, sometimes for two weeks to two months at a time. He also promised to follow up with information but never did.

I followed up several times when I didn't hear back, but he never replied, despite his emails always ending with "feel free to reach out anytime!" I resorted to emailing the interview coordinators – I'm not sure if that helped, but eventually, the recruiter would reach out with some flimsy excuse. The first was "Oh, I was traveling," and the second was "I'm not sure how the coordination team screwed this up." He's great at talking his way out of blame, which I only noticed after several rounds of ghosting and excuses.

The final straw came after the final round interview. I didn't hear back for two weeks, and I had sent a few follow-ups. Finally, I told them I had a deadline due to other offers, and he replied immediately. He told me they would make a decision in one hour and he would be in touch right after. He never reached out after.

I did my best, and I genuinely believe they would have made an offer. But after five months of the most disrespectful recruiting experience, I've finally given up on the desire to work for Canva.

Additionally, the interview experience is quite long and intense. I didn't think they were overly difficult, but their expectations for B3 level are a bit untraditional and unspoken. They want the interviewee to proactively lead conversations, list out options, and talk through Big O, etc. If you miss even a forgivable amount of extra info, they'll likely consider you B2. The other final round sessions, like code review, systems design for frontend, and strategy communication and leadership, are a tad bit superfluous, in my opinion. I see the value, but I don't think they're as useful at vetting candidates as they want them to be.

The employees who interviewed me were quite lovely. They were supportive and helpful during the interviews and seemed like fun people to work with.

@Canva, you need to fix your recruiting experience. This is not how to attract top talent of or to Australia. The recruiter needs to be more attentive. The interview doesn't need to be so unnecessarily intense, especially for how they like to negotiate down and down-level candidates with proven experience.

First Round: Tech Screen

Build a Tic-Tac-Toe validator.

Final Round: Programming Language Fluency Session

Build a game to count how many targets you can click in X seconds, using Vanilla JS, HTML, and CSS only.

Final Round: System Design and Architecture Session

Just a conversation about how you would go about building the Canva editor from scratch.

I get the sense there's a big spread on the types of questions asked in this session, since system design and architecture for frontend is pretty meaningless. The recruiter mentioned this session may just be another coding session for some.

Final Round: Code Review Session

You're presented with some badly written code and have to explain what it's doing and how you'd improve it, as if you were doing a PR review. I recall it was a class with methods that help print logs.