When I was preparing for this interview, I thought the other Glassdoor answers were pretty brief and unhelpful, so I've tried to write down a lot to help others in the future.

TIMELINE: I applied mid-November 2020. I first heard back mid-January 2021 to do a HireVue interview and completed that the next day. I then received a text from a recruiter mid-February to schedule a phone call, which I had later that month. At the end of that phone call, the recruiter went ahead and scheduled me for a final round in early March. I was informed of my offer 6 days later.

HIREVUE: The first interview is asynchronous (you do on your own time) via the HireVue website. You’re shown a question and then have up to 30 seconds before you must start recording a video and give a response to the question, up to 3 min/question for five questions. You don’t know the questions beforehand and no redos.

Some of my HireVue questions (not necessarily verbatim):

• “Fidelity is big with agile. Name some time you’ve worked on a project w/ agile or if you haven’t, what you know about agile.”
• “Fidelity gets a lot of applicants. What do you think sets you apart from the rest?”
• “What’s a time you worked to complete a project in Java?”
• “Describe a time when you ran into difficulty during a project. How did you solve the issue?”

RECRUITER CALL: The recruiter first confirmed some of my resume details such as my graduation date and what I had been doing since, and also confirmed which of the three tracks I was interested in (Software Engineer for me) as each use different languages/technologies. They then also gave me some more details about the position such as salary/benefits, start date, location, etc. before starting to ask me questions. At the end of the interview, the recruiter told me to basically have some projects to talk about/show off, and understand the four pillars of OOP and how to apply them (which I actually never was asked about).

Some questions/topics discussed:

• What interested you specifically about the Leap program and Fidelity?
• Talk me through your time studying computer science at XYZ University. How did you get interested in it? Which class(es) did you enjoy most?
• What’s your strongest programming language of choice? Do you have project examples in this language? Have you used Java/Javascript/SQLite/MongoDB in a project (how?)?
• What would be something you’d like to improve on during your training? Have you tried to do this on your own in a project?

FINAL INTERVIEW ZOOM: The final interview was a Zoom video call with a current Software Engineer at Fidelity - my interviewer had been there for ~6 years. Despite what most other interview reviews here say, my final interview wasn’t really technical. I didn’t have to do any whiteboarding, come up with a pseudocode algorithm, explain how I’d model something, etc. Instead, I did a lot of screen-sharing of a few IDEs (Android Studio, VSCode) to show off projects I had created utilizing the technologies they were looking for (Java, JS, relational databases ie SQL/MongoDB, Python, APIs, frameworks ie Angular/React/Vue). Having those IDEs and projects prepared and pulled up beforehand was definitely the move. I was asked whether I had taken a security course, data structures course, Unix/CLI course, etc. during my time at Uni. They also wanted to know my experience with Agile and working with a group on a project over a longer period of time, if we used any project management tools (ie JIRA) - a question then about a problem I ran into working in that group and how I solved it. They then told me about the languages/technologies primarily used at Fidelity and those that weren’t (C, C++ thank god lol).

Overall a very easy, positive experience.

Fidelity is big with Agile. Name a time you’ve worked on a project with Agile, or if you haven’t, what you know about Agile.

Fidelity gets a lot of applicants. What do you think sets you apart from the rest?

What’s a time you worked to complete a project in Java?

Describe a time when you ran into difficulty during a project. How did you solve the issue?

What interested you specifically about the Leap program and Fidelity?

Talk me through your time studying computer science at XYZ University. How did you get interested in it? Which class(es) did you enjoy most?

What’s your strongest programming language of choice? Do you have project examples in this language? Have you used Java/Javascript/SQLite/MongoDB in a project (how?)?

What would be something you’d like to improve on during your training? Have you tried to do this on your own in a project?