I thought I knew everything there was to know about Skype interviews by the time I got my first job interview from home. It was something I did a lot of in college and after. I knew what to do: go to my bedroom, find a white wall, prop up my computer so my interviewer wouldn’t get a weird view of my nostrils, plug in my headphones, test my makeup and lighting in a test video call, and then patiently wait for my interviewer to arrive.
For my first real remote job interview, I didn’t do any of these things. The interviewer asked if I was free to talk right now, and I always say yes. I wiped tuna fish off my face, logged onto Skype, and hoped for the best. It went great, and I got the job. but all things being equal, Id still have rather had time to prepare.
What should you do before a virtual interview for a job that you can do from home? As with any job interview, you should know your stuff. But for interviews that take place online, you need to set up your space and be ready to answer specific questions about why you want to work from home and if you meet the requirements.
You can find it hard to do well in interviews for remote jobs whether you’re the employer or the applicant. For that reason, we’ve put together four important tips for remote interviews that you should remember whether you’re trying to find out if a candidate has the creativity and independence to work from home or trying to convince a recruiter that you do.
CrowdStreet is an innovative real estate investment platform that connects investors with commercial real estate opportunities. Founded in 2014, the company has established itself as a leader in online real estate investing and crowdfunding.
As a fast-growing startup disrupting the traditional real estate investment industry, CrowdStreet seeks driven, analytical, and entrepreneurial professionals to join its team. The interview process provides keen insights into the company’s culture of innovation, collaboration, and integrity. Understanding what to expect and how to prepare can help set you up for success.
In this comprehensive guide, we will explore the most common CrowdStreet interview questions, tips to tackle them, and examples of strong responses. Whether you are interviewing for an engineering, product, marketing, or other role, use this advice to showcase your skills and make a winning impression.
Overview of the CrowdStreet Hiring Process
The hiring process at CrowdStreet is rigorous but transparent. It aims to evaluate both your technical abilities and cultural fit. Here’s what you can expect:
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Initial Screening Call: A 30-minute phone call with a recruiter to discuss your background and interest. It acts as a first filter before progressing candidates.
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Technical Screen: For engineering roles, a 1-hour technical screen involving coding challenges and discussions on previous projects, architecture patterns, and algorithms.
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Take-Home Assignment You may be assigned a take-home project to work on, allowing for thorough evaluation of your skills. Timeframe varies from 1-3 days based on role.
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Interview Rounds: Typically 4-6 rounds including technical and behavioral interviews. You’ll interact with various team members from potential peers to senior leaders.
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References & Offer Your references will be contacted before extending an offer The process lasts 1-2 months on average Communication from the recruiter is timely throughout.
Thorough preparation and research are key, given the length of the process. The questions aim to understand your strategic thinking, technical competence, leadership abilities, and cultural add. Let’s examine the most common questions and how to tackle them smoothly.
Technical Interview Questions
Technical roles constitute a significant portion of CrowdStreet’s workforce. Engineering product and data professionals can expect a rigorous assessment of their technical acumen and hands-on skills.
Here are some of the most frequently asked technical interview questions:
Q1. Explain how you would design a property inventory system for a real estate marketplace.
This question tests your ability to understand business needs and translate them into a technical solution. When answering:
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Clarify requirements – Understand scale, functionality, and integrations needed. Ask probing questions.
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Propose high-level architecture – Discuss components like search, filters, CRM integration, data model etc.
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Focus on scalability – Highlight how your design supports large inventories and traffic. Database partitioning, caching, microservices etc.
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Mention relevant technologies – Align choices with optimal performance, maintenance, and flexible growth.
Example: “To design a robust property inventory system, I would start by clarifying business requirements around number of listings, traffic volumes, search functionalities, and any third-party integrations needed. Considering scale and performance needs, I would propose a microservices architecture, with independent services for core functions like search, filters, favorites, etc. This allows for easier maintenance and scalability.
The backend would use MongoDB for flexible schemas and scalability. Listings can be sharded to distribute load. Elasticsearch would enable fast and relevant search results. I would optimize queries and indexes for frequently used filters like property type or location. A Redis cache would improve response times for repetitive queries. Finally, API gateways and load balancers would handle traffic surges and equalize loads between services.”
Q2. How do you optimize and speed up the performance of React applications?
React is popular at CrowdStreet, so expect questions on optimizing its performance. When answering:
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Discuss proactive optimizations – Code splitting, suspense, SSR, throttling etc.
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Highlight reactive techniques – Analyzing bottlenecks, profiling, auditing etc.
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Demonstrate expertise – Mention specific tools and methodologies that yield the best results.
Example: “To optimize React app performance, I start with best practices like code splitting, lazy loading, and throttling expensive functions to avoid over-rendering. For truly proactive optimization, I leverage server-side rendering for initial faster page loads. During development, I use Chrome dev tools to identify and fix bottlenecks. The React profiler lets me pinpoint resource intensive components.
For more complex apps, I conduct regular performance audits using Lighthouse. This helps benchmark and monitor optimizations over time. In terms of tools, React Query is invaluable for efficient data fetching, while Recoil manages state optimally. I also utilize libraries like React Window for efficient rendering of long lists. For styling, Styled Components via CSS-in-JS yield faster page loads. Following these methodologies has consistently improved runtime performance for my React projects.”
Q3. How would you improve the security of an existing legacy system without fully rewriting it?
Modernizing legacy systems for security is complex. Demonstrate pragmatic thinking and in-depth security knowledge.
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Prioritize critical vulnerabilities – Focus on areas of maximum risk impact. OWASP Top 10 is a good guide.
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Propose incremental changes – Fixing issues piecemeal while maintaining functionality.
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Highlight tactical tools – Security scanners, pen testing, threat modeling etc.
Example: “When enhancing security for legacy systems, I start by conducting a thorough audit of vulnerabilities, referring to resources like OWASP Top 10. This allows me to classify and prioritize risks, focusing first on fixes with maximal impact, like injection flaws and broken authentication.
I then take an incremental approach to remediating issues based on priority. For example, implementing parameterized queries and upgrading hashing algorithms for password storage can be done modularly. Tactical tools like static analyzers and fuzzers help uncover issues without affecting functionality. For larger vulnerabilities, I may have to refactor or re-architect components using secure coding standards – but in a staged manner that maintains continuity. Penetration testing also helps validate fixes and identify residual gaps. With this focused, stepwise approach, legacy systems can be made robust without risky full rewrites.”
Q4. How would you design a scalable cloud architecture for a data-intensive analytics application?
This assesses your knowledge of scalable cloud-native architecture patterns. Bring up:
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Separation of concerns – Breaking into logical layers like frontend, backend, storage etc.
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Horizontal scaling – Increasing instances to handle demand. Auto-scaling, load balancing.
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Managed services – RDS, SQS, Lambda etc. Reduce overhead.
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Caching and optimization – CDNs, query optimization, compression.
Example: “For a data-intensive analytics application, I would design a cloud architecture centered around scalability and optimized performance. The frontend UI components can run on servers like EC2, scaled horizontally via auto-scaling groups and load balancers. The application backend can run in containers on ECS clusters for easier management.
For the data layer, I would leverage AWS managed databases like Redshift for analytical workloads and RDS for transactions, ensuring adequate read replicas for scalability. A serverless data pipeline with Lambda functions, SQS and S3 would enable robust ETL capabilities. CloudFront CDNs would cache frequently accessed data for low latency. Purpose-built tools like Athena and Quicksight would handle ad-hoc analysis and dashboards.”
Product Management Interview Questions
Product managers are key stakeholders in bringing CrowdStreet’s platform vision to life. Expect questions that evaluate your user empathy, market analysis, and strategic thinking skills:
Q5. How would you identify the need for a new product feature and validate if it is worthwhile to build?
Our Top 4 Remote Interview Tips
- Dress the part. Your interviewer will probably be dressed casually since they work from home, so you don’t have to wear a full suit or even just the top half of one. However, you should try to look your best, whatever that means to you. What you wear should make you feel good about yourself and comfortable. You might want to go a step further than a t-shirt.
- Make sure your computer is set up well in advance. If a company asks you to do an interview via Zoom, make sure you have it downloaded and know how it works before the interview. I may or may not have done this, and I may or may not have had a panic attack as I emailed my interviewer quickly to say I was having problems. There should be at least an hour of practice with the program that the interview will be in, even if you think you know how to use it well. You have no idea how many times I’ve had Skype interviews only to find that my computer needed to be restarted because of an annoying update.
- Find a quiet place with a reliable internet connection. If you’re in Buenos Aires, I can tell you for sure that a Starbucks isnt it. Whether you have the interview at home or a co-working space, make sure the internet is fast and reliable. Use headphones to remove distractions and cut down on echo!.
- Play it cool. If you’ve done your “technical” homework, you shouldn’t have too many problems. But you never know. If there is a heat wave in Buenos Aires, you might lose power right before your interview. Or, your neighbor might decide that 3 p.m. on a Thursday is the best time to play loud heavy metal. If something like this happens, talk to your interviewer about it and offer solutions. Show them you can solve problems, and they’ll probably forgive you for the rest.
Interviewers: Things like was the call quality good? Was the person on time? If there were any problems, were they helpful while fixing them? Things happen, and a bad connection shouldn’t always be a deal-breaker, but keep in mind that if something went wrong during the interview, it probably will happen again if you hire that person. While it’s not a reason not to hire them if they have an old, buggy laptop or don’t really know how to use a Zoom meeting, you should have a plan in place to make sure these problems don’t happen again. Know that you’ll need to train them on the tools your organization uses, and think about whether giving them money to buy a better computer and/or better internet is a good idea. (Spoiler alert: It probably is. ).
Be able to articulate why you want to work remotely.
There will be some kind of question about why you want to work from home, especially if this is your first time doing it. You need to be prepared to give a thoughtful answer that goes beyond, “I hate wearing pants. “.
There isn’t a right or wrong answer to this question, but giving your interviewer a strong reason will show that you’ve given it some thought and know what it means to work from home. It will also help you be sure that remote work is a good fit (it isnt for everyone!). Some questions you can ask yourself to help build a thoughtful response to this overarching question are:
- What is it about offices you dislike?
- What do you think you’ll miss most about working in an office?
- What makes you most excited about working from home? What worries you the most?
- What makes you think you can get work done from home (or anywhere else)?
Interviewers: When you ask, “Why do you want to work from home?” you should really be asking, “Why do you think you can be successful working from home for my company, and do you see yourself there in the medium to long term?” You want to make sure that they want to work from home for more than just a short time.
Plan ahead for how long you’d like the applicant to stay in the job, and try to get a sense of whether they’re willing to work from home for at least that long. If they’re an expat or digital nomad, it might be easy to see why they want a remote job: they want to keep making money in a stable currency while they travel or live abroad (I wasn’t trying to hide the fact that I wanted to make dollars in Argentina). Although this is fine in and of itself, make sure you know how long they plan to stay where they are. If they move, changes in timezone or cost of living could affect their future at your company.
TOP 5 HARDEST INTERVIEW QUESTIONS & Top-Scoring ANSWERS!
FAQ
What is the best answer to tell me about yourself?
Why should we hire you?
What makes you stand out from other candidates?
What is the interview process like at CrowdStrike?
The interview process consisted of 4 rounds plus a take home design challenge. There’s the initial interview with the recruiter, a meeting with the hiring manager, a design challenge, a portfolio review, and then a cross functional meeting. Why are you interested in CrowdStrike? I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks.
How do you answer A CrowdStrike interview question?
This question is a way for the interviewer to assess your ability to sell CrowdStrike’s products and services. Your answer should show that you are confident, persuasive and comfortable with selling to clients. Example: “I am an effective salesperson because I have strong communication skills and can empathize with my clients.
How many interview questions are there at CrowdStrike?
CrowdStrike interview questions. Prepfully has 825 interview questions asked at CrowdStrike. All interview questions are submitted by recent CrowdStrike candidates, labelled and categorized by Prepfully, and then published after verification by current and ex- CrowdStrike employees. What do you do to make yourself stand out?
What is crowdstreet and how does it work?
Founded in 2013, Crowd street has emerged as the #1 crowdfunding platform. Today, the company is one of the industry-leading startups in United Statesfor CRE developers and operators. Through CrowdStreet’s marketplace, consumers get to access institutional-quality commercial real estate offerings.
