I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Zillow (Seattle, WA) in Apr 2015
Interview
The interview process took about three weeks. It started with an informal phone call with a recruiter, followed by a take home coding test and then two 45 minute phone interviews. After the second phone interview I received an email stating that they would not be moving forward with me. I believe the next stage would have been an in person interview loop.
The take home coding test was a Trinary search tree as others have described. I think the main point of the exercise is too see how you handle duplicate entries as the time complexity can be constant or linear depending on how you handle this case. I also wrote a bash script that ran several test cases on the Trinary Search Tree out of input files and output the result to the terminal. There was a second question regarding converting a String to a Long which has some tricky edge cases that must be accounted for and I wrote a test script for that too.
The two 45 minute interviews were pretty standard. I don't remember the exact questions for the first but they were basic coding tests done on collabedit. The first interviewer was helpful and I answered the questions without much problem.
For the second 45 minute interview I had an impatient interviewer that seemed ready to get off the call as soon as possible. I initially paused while solving the Least Common Ancestor problem but managed to get to the optimal solution in about 15 minutes. However, at that point we were about 25 minutes into the interview and the interviewer decided he did not want to ask me a second question. I asked a couple of questions about Zillow then the interviewer ended the call early (about 35 minutes in).
The interview process was positive up until the last interviewer, who came across as a busy engineer that wanted to end the call before it began. I feel as though with a less hurried interviewer I may have moved on to an interview loop.
Having spent a considerable amount of time preparing for the interviews, doing the take home coding tests, and doing the actual interview, I feel that the least the interviewer could have done was to ask the second coding question and finish out the interview.
I would not seek out an interview with Zillow again based off of my experience.
Protip: I believe all the questions I got are ones that are already here on Glassdoor. Already knowing the optimal solutions to those questions should help immensely for anyone interviewing in the future.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Find the Least Common Ancestor given two nodes of a binary tree. The nodes each have a reference to their parent node and you do not have the root node of the tree.
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Zillow (Guadalajara, Jalisco)
Interview
El proceso consta de 8 partes.
RH Interview
Code Challenge
Code Challenge para resolver en casa
Behavioral
Code refactoring
System Desing
Posibles dos entrevistas para Team Fit
Al final te ghostean y no te dan ni las gracias por el tiempo dedicado
1
Zillow response
1mo
Thank you for taking the time to share your interview experience with us. We appreciate the time and effort that goes into completing a multi-step process like this. We’re sorry to hear that your experience didn’t meet expectations, particularly around communication at the end of the process. That’s not the experience we aim to provide, and your feedback helps us identify where we need to improve. Thank you again for your perspective.
I applied online. I interviewed at Zillow (Ciudad de Mexico) in Oct 2025
Interview
Entrevista técnica live coding donde te plantean un escenario de una entrada y la salida esperada, debes de explicar lo que piensas y como podrías aplicarlo para una solución, en mi caso me dieron un archivo con texto plano
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Tomar 1 archivo y trabajar en una salida programando
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Zillow (Guadalajara, Jalisco) in Mar 2025
Interview
Me gustó mucho el proceso, los reclutadores y los entrevistadores fueron muy amables y atentos. Siempre hubo una respuesta muy rápida después de cada entrevista.
El proceso duró un poco más de un mes, ya que tardaban un poco en agendar las entrevistas