Great to see Monzo approaching hiring with recognition of complexity and nuance, as opposed to the somewhat brittle methods that seem to be the norm.
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Do Monzo run group or 121 interviews for co-ops roles? Has anyone got any experience of these interviews and what they entail?
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Hi @anon23935806
Just curious as to what stage you actually made it through to? Were you rejected at first try or was it later in the decision process?
Cheers!
I think each interview is unique to the applicant! What they will entail is entirely up to you and although this may sound a bit vague - the idea is to find out whether you fit the job/organisation and whether it fits you as well 
Just the initial stage, sent my rĂ©sumĂ© and about a week later got told that I didnât have enough customer-facing experience (Iâm a software engineer but before that I did have experience as customer advisor at O2). Oh well, thatâs too bad but I guess given the number of candidates Monzo can allow themselves to pickyâŠ
Ah thatâs a shame! Iâve got quite a lot of customer service experience, so hoping that puts me in good stead. Itâs good to get feed back. I had a job where I had to ask twice for feedback and they still didnât give me any. That was most disappointing when it was for a department in the Oxford University as well.
Have you applied for any other jobs with them? You seem like you may be qualified for other things!
Iâd love to but unfortunately their tech stack is nowhere near my area of expertise (they are using a totally different programming language). 
Oh man thatâs a shame! Maybe something to study and learn for?
Well it depends. The language Iâm currently using (both at my employerâs and my own company) â Python â has still years if not decades of life ahead of it. While Go (the language Monzo are using) is definitely a good (or better, for some use-cases) alternative Iâm not sure itâs worth my time to learn it at this point (is Monzo going to retroactively pay me for the time I spent learning the language? 
)
Monzo are offering internships as well so I inquired if thereâs any chance I could get one of those despite not being a student, weâll see what they say. If it ends up being a possibility then itâll definitely be awesome, especially since learning a new language with experienced people to help you out along the way is more efficient than trying it on your own IMO.
Haha I doubt theyâd retrospectively pay you!
Thatâs a good idea, I think Iâd go for an internship too if there were no other options! Best of luck to you, sounds like you are already doing well for yourself anyway.
Letâs look at the backend engineer post, and see if I would qualify in an way.
Background: 4 years as a software engineer touching many languages from Java to PHP and C [and I wonât disclose COBOL]. Personal projects are a mixture of Java and PHP, but not C. Working in the financial services sector is an interesting one⊠I love it and hate it; itâs not Marmite. Most recently, Iâve been on the partnerships / integration team (working with partners such as Ripple etc), and now Iâm designing and building APIs. (Actually, I reviewed and demoed Monzo and Transferwiseâs APIs and described how I personally didnât like them). Personal projects? I wish I had more time, but recently, the stuff Iâve been working on is related to a concurrent IRC bot - doesnât do that much now, but Iâm building it so that it does.
You should apply if:
the work weâre doing sounds exciting!
Sure does, itâs why I invested and use Monzo. I donât just think what youâre doing sounds exciting, but I believe in the product.
you want to be involved in building a product that you and everyone you know uses literally every day
Continuing from above, oh yes - anything which can make the lives of people easier - especially financially; itâs so damn important to be able to understand how one spends money, but, the information from that really tells a lot about a person. It can be used to help people make better financial decisions.
youâre keen to learn more about new technologies and the arcane inner workings of the financial industry
Is there any developer who isnât keen to learn more about new technologies? Seems like a weird criteria to meâŠ
youâre comfortable working in a team that deals with ambiguity every day - The customer never knows what they want 
But seriously, I believe that MVP, prototyping and such are part and parcel of rapid software development.
youâre interested in distributed systems and writing resilient software
Oh hell yes⊠sadly, I havenât had much exposure to them. Iâve only read about them.
you have some experience with strongly-typed languages (e.g. Go, Java, C, ScalaâŠ)
Yeah, I know Java, learned Scala for fun - didnât touch Go, and I wouldnât be opposed to either. I also know some JS and Angular, but I donât regularly play with it.
So - from that, the answers may indicate a mediocre application - probably insufficient to get through one of the early stages of the funnel? Itâs the candidate questions which pique my interest though:
- What attracted you to Monzo?
- What stack/technologies are you most familiar with?
- How would you find out if somebody is a good software engineer? [love this question, because the answer is never really getting them to write code on a whiteboard or write some algorithm]. Two questions I love asking are: how many languages can you speak? Whatâs the process of speaking in a different language to your mother tongue?
The former two might be answered in the previous criteria.
All in all, seems like an ok question-set, but the page doesnât tell me more about what they consider to be a suitable candidate beyond a basic set of criteria.
Some questions I would have as a candidate:
- Does Monzo (teams) subscribe to any development process: waterfall / agile? [disclosure, Iâve been a ScrumMaster for 4 years] - if I recall correctly, each team is autonomous ⊠Iâd like to see how this works in practice
- Does engineering suggest TDD should be used where possible?
- Is there a drive to refactor legacy systems and code (every self-developing organisation has this, regardless of age). All developers know that working with legacy systems drives them crazy ⊠which leads onto my last question:
- What does the company understand in âWorking software over comprehensive documentationâ?
@mcampbell I hope you find these to be useful.
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Since when has C been a strongly typed language? 
Maybe statically typed would be a better phrase, given that C supports implicit conversions between types.
I applied for customer operations early this year, hereâs my experience:
The application took a long time. A lot longer than the few weeks quoted on the website. At every stage, it took a long time to hear back from Monzo once each stage was completed. I guess it was a busy period, and Iâm happy to see things have improved 
.
I got through to the final in-person interview, which I found difficult as I would say I can be quite shy, but it was interesting nonetheless (although I was very nervous I tried not to show it, and i thought it went okay) 
.
Unfortunately, I wasnât offered a position, which was a shame but I understand they must have a lot of applicants. Fair enough.
However I do have one gripe 
. By this point, I had obviously invested a fair amount of time in the process. This is totally to be expected for an exciting job opportunity. The eventual response I received, however, didnât really include much (or any) constructive feedback. The email basically said I âgave some really well-considered answers during the interviewsâ but that âweâve decided to move forward with another candidateâ and thatâs it.
Candidates do put quite a bit of time into the application process, and especially if they have got as far as the final round interview, I think it is fair to give them a little more feedback, such the experience is constructive overall, even if ultimately unsuccessful. I also think this would chime well with monzoâs values of transparency/empathy etc.
Iâd be interested in your thoughts on thies, @mcampbell, particular with regards to your policy on feedback for applicants. 
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Wouldnât be surprised to hear the typical (I hope i am wrong!) âWe canât give personal feedback due to the high volume of applicantsâ line which most companies give on that one. I agree that if you have got to the interview stage and been unsuccessful then you should be able to expect some sort of feedback rather than a general âWell done, however you have been unsuccessfulâ
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Actually, they didnât mention anything along those lines, although they did say they enjoyed meeting me 
⊠Perhaps at the actual in-person interview stage they donât have that many people that it would be unreasonable to expect some constructive feedback, so they preferred not to be misleading in that wayâŠ
Thatâs good that they didnât say that to you 
. I can understand maybe if they do have hundreds of people who they interview face to face that it may be unreasonable to expect personal feedback.
My personal opinion is that if you take the time to apply for the role and get an interview and are unsuccessful then it would take a few minutes per applicant to write a brief personal feedback email. I always think the âWe have too many applicantsâ is a cop out and shows that companies donât value people who invest their time but are unsuccessful
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Hi,
I took time out of my day to apply for the risk and compliance role and I havenât hear anything back . Itâs going two weeks now and it would be nice to get some feed back even if I donât get an interview.
Thanks,
Hope
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Obviously the process will vary, depending on which role you apply for but if anyone wants to get a sense of what the experience of applying for a job with Monzo is like, one of the new members of the team has written this -
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I have some feedback.
The canned responses from the hiring system that Monzo use no not scream Monzo at all.
The canned response I got with my assessment told me that I didnât have as good understanding of the task than that of other candidates.
It wasnât until I emailed back, basically saying âWtfâ that I got told, oh no it was because there were a lot of grammatical errors and I didnât portray âThe Monzo tone of voiceâ
The rejection phase of the process does need a bit of work. Baring in mind the people that you are rejecting might be your customers. I honestly didnât want to go anywhere near Monzo ever again. Got an email to say they were really pleased with my application, gave me a task, I sent it back. Waited 3 weeks for a response due to Christmas, just to get an email sent saying sorry you didnât show a good level of understanding to the task.
There we go 
I also think itâs stupid, that had I used grammerly (which I did think aboutâŠ) I might have stood a chance
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