I applied directly through their website in January 2018 and got the notification in April 2018 after which the whole process took 1+ month My first interaction with Zillow was through an HR call in which one of the HRs asked specific questions based on my resume and past experience. She inquired about my visa status, relocation preference and my experience with the previous employer. At the end of the call she said that she will try best to match my experience with the relevant team at Zillow and sent me a hackerrank assessment. As the second round, i was given 40 hours to finish a programming assessment on hackerrank. I choose to do it in Java. There were two moderately complex programming task which, given the time, can be easily solved. Thumbs up to that. I got the result of the second round two weeks after my submission and a different HR mailed me asking for my availability during the next two weeks for an interview with a Machine Learning Engineer at Zillow. I provided several dates from the next two weeks and they chose one of those. This is the part where things got finicky. During the e-mail conversations and on-call discussion, It was made clear that this upcoming interview will be about my past experience and ML in general. I left no stone unturned to prepare fundamentals of ML with coding in R to give it my best shot. (I can put my github link to show how much I actually prepared for this thing, but then it doesn't remain anonymous) Seems like a good strategy. Right ? Wrong! So I got the call from the ML engineer at Zillow who started the interview asking for my introduction and some questions on what i did as a part of my last internship. As i was given a hackerrank link prior to this interview for peer coding, we both logged into it and what came next was nothing short of a surprise for me. He started asking questions on data structures and manipulations while he was supposed to discuss ML. It felt more like a software engineer interview and had nothing to do with ML. I tried informing him that this is not what he is supposed to ask, as discussed before with the HRs and in the emails and the position is for an ML engineer but he said he's gonna ask data structures (apparently for no reason). So much effort of writing KNN, NN, Regression, Clustering etc from scratch in R goes to waste as it looked like my interviewer wasn't interested in ML (AT ALL). As i struggled through the interview, i tried hard, solving those tricky questions in data structures and could not solve any. It wasn't something i couldn't do, it just came as a shock and caught me completely off guard. At the very end, (in the 55th minute of the scheduled 1 hour interview) he asked some concepts about ML algorithms which i can say i nailed. The next day, i mailed the second HR informing her about the incidence and requesting a proper ML interview (since i am still confident about my abilities for this position as ML is what i do on daily basis, being a Data Science graduate student). She never replied back. Two days later, I got a rejection email for the same indicating the " other candidates whose skills and experience better align with the needs for this role". (Sure) Things that went wrong- 1. Highly unreachable HRs : Using jobvite accounts to send emails and due to some bug, i couldn't see those messages in jobvite. I sent a email to the HR explaining the situation after the interview. Still waiting for a reply. 2. Disregard for matching candidate's skills with respective team : Although the HRs said she would best match my experience with a team in Zillow, i was surprised to hear when my interviewer explained the technologies they work on in a typical day. Since I am working more in R and have little experience with Python (it isn't even listed on my resume), basically i had to start from ground zero if i were ever to join that team. I am fine with learning new technologies and would have contributed readily in a R based team, but thats just bad matching-up on HRs part. Good things about this experience 1. Everyone was very professional and courteous. 2. Time management with 3 graduate courses during ML preparation for this interview. 3. No matter what the position is, you gotta do some irrelevant hackerrank assessment (idk when the world will move past this, anyway!) I really hoped to give feedback to the team, but seeing their apathy towards communication, I'd rather tell you guys here. Hope it helps.