I applied online. The process took 5 months. I interviewed at Canva in Apr 2024
Interview
Absolutely horrible recruiter and experience ever. The process has taken 5 months.
I initially speak with a recruiter in April. He's super cheery, says he's in charge of recruiting for FE engineers. However, he consistently ghosts after each round of interviews anywhere between 2 weeks to 2 months at a time. He also promises to follow up with information but never did. I follow up several times when I don't hear back, but he never replies despite his emails always ending in "feel free to reach out anytime!" I resorted to emailing the interview coordinators - not sure if that helped but eventually the recruiter would reach out with some flimsy excuse (first was "oh I was traveling", second was "I'm not sure how the coordination team screwed this up"). He's great at talking his way out of the blame, which I only noticed after several rounds of ghosting and making excuses.
The final straw came after the final round interview. I didn't hear back for 2 weeks, and I'd sent a few followups. Finally, I tell them I have a deadline due to other offers and he replies immediately. He tells me they'll make a decision in one hour and he'll be in touch right after. He never reached out after.
I did my best, and I genuinely believe they would've made an offer. But after 5 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 and 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 Leader are a tad bit superfluous, imo. I see the value, but I don't think they're as useful at vetting candidates as they want it 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/to Australia. Recruiter needs to be more attentive. Interview doesn't need to be so unnecessarily intense, esp for how they like to neg and down level candidates with proven experience.
Interview questions [4]
Question 1
First round tech screen:
Build a tic tac toe validator.
Final round, system design and architecture session
Just a conversation about "how would you go about building the Canva editor from scratch".
I get the sense that there's a big spread on the types of questions they'd ask in this session, since system design and architecture for frontend is pretty meaningless. Recruiter said this session may just be another coding session for some.
Final round, code review session:
You're presented some badly written code and you have to explain what it is doing and how you'd improve it, as if you were doing a PR review. IIRC it was a class with methods that help print logs.