I spoke with a recruiter at a career fair. Approximately two weeks later, I received a phone call from the same recruiter.

The recruiter described the hiring process, but surprisingly, only asked behavioral questions such as, "What is your ideal work environment?" and "Why Yelp?" Technical questions were not posed.

After our phone conversation, she sent me a coding assessment. It was timed at 28 minutes and consisted of 15 short-answer trivia questions (most of which can be found online) and one coding question that could be completed at my convenience. The expectation appears to be that most of these questions should be answered correctly.

A few hours later, the recruiter sent me an invitation for a phone screen.

During the phone screen, an engineer inquired about a previous project and presented a design question (e.g., troubleshooting a slow HTTP request response) and a coding question, with each exercise timed at 20 minutes. I was unable to complete the coding question within the allotted time. I likely put myself at a disadvantage by implementing it in Java, as Python would have been a simpler choice.

Yelp's employees seem very efficient, perhaps a bit aloof. Ensure you are also efficient and fast.

The recruiter sent a standard rejection email a week after my phone screen. Oh well. I had already received another job offer that would have been more competitive than Yelp's offer anyway.

The questions can be found here on Glassdoor.

The coding question was the standard grouping of anagrams.