After applying online, I received a very casual recruiting email a few weeks later about a specific product engineering position. Honestly, I wasn't sure if it was real, as it wasn't addressed to me. However, I looked up the recruiter and found she was listed on LinkedIn as a Facebook employee, so I responded.

It took some time to determine if she could continue as my recruiter or if I needed to go through a university-specific recruiter. Once my first phone interview was set up, the process moved quite quickly.

The first phone interview was a 45-minute coding interview, pretty standard for large companies. I completed two questions.

What was unique about this process was the feedback from that initial interview, which the recruiter shared with me. This allowed me to improve for the in-person interview, and I think it's a great reflection of Facebook's open culture.

Facebook, like Google, generally doesn't hire for specific teams. However, they took the time to find a project at Facebook I would find especially interesting and filled my in-person interview with people from that team so I could ask them questions about it.

Facebook has three types of interviews, which they call Ninja, Pirate, and Jedi (because they are the best kind of dorks).

• Ninja: A typical coding interview where they ask 1-2 coding questions.
• Jedi: A culture fit interview where they ask how you work on a team, but you will also spend half the time coding.

I had two Ninja interviews and one Jedi interview.

I believe Pirate interviews are focused on distributed systems-type questions, but I was informed that they often skip these for New Grads without explicit experience. This is because it's something most people learn on the job, and they don't get strong data from those interviews.

It's also worth noting that during my job search, I had coding interviews with 18 people, and 17 of them were men. Facebook was the one company where I had a technical interview with a woman, although it was still the Jedi interview.

I applied to Google at the same time as Facebook. Their process moved a little faster, so I received an offer from Google the day before my in-person interview. Thankfully, I had enough time for Facebook to submit their counter offer. The recruiter's care in setting me up with that team was a significant factor in my decision to go with Facebook.

I signed an NDA not to reveal questions, but I did feel well prepared by studying questions and strategies from Cracking the Coding Interview.