What do you think about interviews? They’re awful, stressful events that go by quickly but stay with you for a long time. Or, at least, that’s the traditional model. But who would want that? Interviews should be a chance to show off your best qualities and decide if you want to work for that company.
It took a lot of work to make sure that our interview process is thorough and consistent, and we’re still working hard to get rid of as many sources of bias as we can. So far, we’ve found that it accurately predicts who will do well here—those who are highly technical and also live by Slack’s values, which are empathy, courtesy, craftsmanship, solidarity, playfulness, and thriving.
Looking to land your dream job at Slack? With over 12 million daily active users, this fast-growing startup has transformed business communication. But getting hired at Slack is highly competitive. You’ll need to ace the interview to stand out.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore the top Slack interview questions and how to prepare winning answers. From technical queries to leadership scenarios, these tips will help you tackle any question confidently.
Overview of the Slack Hiring Process
Before diving into specific questions, let’s look at what to expect during the overall Slack interview process
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Initial Screening Call Slack interviews often kick off with a 30-60 minute phone screening with a recruiter This is a chance to briefly assess your skills and experience Be ready to discuss your background and interest in the role/company,
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Technical Assessments: For engineering roles, you may need to complete online coding tests or assignments. These focus on data structures, algorithms, and other CS fundamentals.
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Multiple Interview Rounds: Expect 4-6 rounds of interviews, each 45-60 minutes long. You’ll speak with managers, potential coworkers, and senior leadership.
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Format: Slack interviews tend to be conversational and relaxed. But you’ll still need to demonstrate technical competence and alignment with company values. Case studies and whiteboarding questions are common.
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Communication: Recruiters strive to provide updates and next steps promptly. However, some candidates report delays between interview rounds. Overall, the process is considered well-organized.
With an overview of what to expect, let’s get into the nitty gritty Slack interview questions.
Technical Slack Interview Questions
Not surprisingly, technical aptitude is crucial for any engineering role at Slack. You’ll need to demonstrate your hands-on skills in areas like system design, infrastructure, security, and troubleshooting. Here are some of the most common technical questions:
Q1: How would you design a scalable API for Slack’s messaging functionality?
This tests your system design abilities. Focus on discussing:
- Adopting RESTful architecture for simplicity and scalability
- Implementing versioning to maintain backwards compatibility
- Leveraging caching, pagination, and rate limiting for performance
- Scaling horizontally with load balancers to handle high traffic
Q2: How would you ensure optimal performance across Slack on web, desktop, and mobile apps?
Showcase your expertise in:
- Responsive design principles and testing on different platforms
- Identifying and optimizing performance bottlenecks
- Monitoring metrics like load times, ERROR rates, and slow queries
- Improving code efficiency through caching, lazy loading, and concurrent requests
Q3: How would you securely implement end-to-end encryption for Slack messaging?
Demonstrate you can balance security with usability:
- Discuss encryption protocols like Signal that enable E2E encryption
- Explain challenges for features like searchability and syncing across devices
- Suggest solutions like encrypted search indexes and device sync with cryptography
- Emphasize the importance of threat modeling throughout the process
Q4: How would you troubleshoot a performance issue causing high latency in Slack?
Walk through your structured problem-solving approach:
- Isolate the problem domain through logs, metrics, and monitoring
- Dig deeper via debugging tools and queries to identify the root cause
- Consider options like code optimization, caching, database indexing to address
- Implement changes incrementally and track impact through performance metrics
- Continuously refine based on data and user feedback
Slack Behavioral Interview Questions
In addition to technical competence, Slack cares deeply about cultural fit. Expect several behavioral or situational questions aimed at gauging your soft skills and mindset.
Q5: Tell me about a time you successfully drove adoption of a new tool or process within a resistant team.
Demonstrate you can:
- Understand hesitations and empathize with different perspectives
- Identify influencers/champions to promote the change
- Create buy-in by clearly communicating benefits and providing training/support
- Iterate based on feedback while maintaining positivity and constructive relationships
Q6: How would you handle a disgruntled customer complaining about poor platform performance?
Show you can:
- Listen attentively to understand their frustrations
- Take ownership of the issue and commit to resolving it
- Set expectations on timeline and keep the customer updated
- Follow through and ensure the customer is satisfied with the resolution
Q7: Describe a time you had a conflict with a coworker. How did you handle it?
Share how you:
- Approached the conflict calmly and objectively
- Allowed both sides to voice their perspectives without interruption
- Found common ground and identified solutions agreeable to all
- Continued nurturing a respectful relationship long-term
Q8: Tell me about a time you failed or made a mistake at work. What did you learn?
Demonstrate you:
- Take ownership of mistakes rather than blame others
- Analyze the failure to understand the root causes
- Identify key learnings and apply those lessons to improve
- Maintain resilience and persist through challenges
With thoughtful answers highlighting your collaboration and problem-solving skills, you can ace the behavioral questions.
Slack Manager Interview Questions
For leadership roles, expect more questions assessing your ability to manage teams, projects, and company growth. Here are some examples:
Q9: How would you go about improving employee retention and satisfaction at Slack?
Discuss tactics like:
- Regular pulse surveys to gather feedback
- Mentorship and learning programs to nurture growth
- Flexible work arrangements to support work-life balance
- ClearCareer progression framework and opportunities
- Continual tuning of culture to meet evolving needs
Q10: How would you build an effective onboarding program for new engineers at Slack?
Share ideas such as:
- Assigning mentors to provide guidance and support
- Providing training in core systems, architecture, and processes
- Setting up peer buddy systems to encourage camaraderie
- Giving onboarding checklists and ramp-up goals
- Gathering feedback regularly to improve the program
Q11: What KPIs would you track to measure the success of the sales team at Slack?
Suggest metrics such as:
- Sales cycle length to optimize efficiency
- Lead conversion rates by channel to focus efforts
- Customer lifetime value to gauge retention
- Customer expansion revenue for upsell opportunities
- Churn rate to proactively address attrition
Thoughtful and thorough responses will demonstrate your leadership abilities.
Questions for Specific Slack Roles
In addition to the general questions above, be ready for more specialized queries tailored to your intended role at Slack.
For Software Engineering roles:
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Explain how you would diagnose and debug an issue in Slack’s mobile app causing crashes
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How would you optimize Slack’s search architecture and algorithms to improve speed and relevance?
For Product Management roles:
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How would you prioritize features on Slack’s product roadmap? What factors would you consider?
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Walk me through how you would launch a significant new feature for Slack from ideation to rollout.
For Design roles:
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Discuss your approach to designing an intuitive, user-friendly onboarding flow for new Slack users.
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How would you conduct user research to guide the redesign of Slack’s navigation and menus?
For Sales roles:
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How would you identify and qualify prospects for Slack’s premium enterprise plans?
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Tell me about your experience upselling existing customers and expanding their usage of platform features.
With dedicated preparation matching your domain expertise, you can master the role-specific questions too.
Questions You Should Ask at a Slack Interview
The interview is a two-way street – you should be assessing whether Slack offers the right growth opportunities for you. Prepare 2-3 thoughtful questions to ask your interviewers:
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What do you enjoy most about working at Slack? What’s unique about the culture?
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How does the team collaborate? Are there opportunities to work cross-functionally?
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What professional development and learning opportunities are offered at Slack?
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How is performance measured and does Slack provide opportunities for advancement?
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What are the biggest challenges facing this team currently? How can I contribute solutions?
Smart questions demonstrate your engagement and let you gather intel to determine if Slack is the right fit.
How to Prepare for a Slack Interview
With practice and preparation, you can confidently tackle any question at your Slack interview:
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Research Slack: Understand the company values, products, tech stack, and competitors.
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Study job description: Highlight must-have technical and soft skills to brush up.
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Practice answering questions: Compile your own responses and practice aloud to polish delivery.
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Prepare stories: Identify anecdotes that highlight your achievements and skills.
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Brush up on CS fundamentals: Review core data
What we look for in interviewees
Before anything else, we want to hire skilled engineers who love programming and are very good at what they do. We like people who can take their team to the next level instead of just themselves and who are eager to learn more about how things work and what our customers want. People who work well with others and know how important it is to have a team with people from different backgrounds, thoughts, ideas, and real-life experiences do well on Slack. So do people who make their own decisions and get things done.
The Slack SF cafeteria
What does the interview process look like?
People do better in interviews when they know what to expect ahead of time. Here is a summary of how we do things. We follow the same process for all web engineering candidates, regardless of position or level of experience:
1. At a high level, we’re checking to see if you’re a good fit for the job you applied for. There are a lot of great people out there, but not all of them will be a good fit for Slack, and Slack won’t be a good fit for everyone. We don’t care where or even if you went to college. What matters is your experience and how much you love your job.
2. Talking on the phone with one of our technical recruiters for about 30 minutes. They will ask you general questions about what you want and why you’re interested in Slack.
3. A technical task: We want to see how you write code in real life because we think that’s the best way to tell how you’d write code at Slack every day. The Slack codebase is bigger and more complicated than any technical exercise, but we’ve found that the technical exercise is a good way to predict how well someone will do on the job. It doesn’t matter what company an engineer works for; this gives everyone a chance to shine, no matter where they are now.
This depends on the job, but in general, you’ll have one week to finish a technical task and send us the code and a working solution.
The exercise is graded against a rigorous set of over 30 predetermined criteria. We’re looking for code that is clean, readable, performant, and maintainable. We spent a lot of time coming up with these criteria to make sure that the score is a good reflection of the quality of the work, no matter who grades it. We do this to limit bias. The outcome is less likely to be changed by things that don’t have anything to do with the candidate but might affect the score, like if the grader is having a good day.
It’s important to know that we go to great lengths to make sure the technical exercise is graded without any bias. When someone turns in an exercise for most jobs, the person grader hasn’t seen their name or resume. We’re working on making this possible for all jobs. For some jobs, candidates must send in a working version of their coding assignment, and some choose to host it on their own website. To keep the URL secret from graders, we are looking into ways to hide it.
4. An in-depth conversation about your background, the technical problems you’re currently facing, and what you’re looking for in your next job over the phone with the hiring manager. This often lasts an hour. We want you to ask any questions you have, so bring a list of things you want to know about Slack.
5. An onsite interviewThis usually takes around 4 hours. Each engineer will give you 45 minutes of time, and then you’ll have 15 minutes with the hiring manager. During our in-person interview, we’ll talk about technical and architectural issues and see how well your values match up with those at Slack.
We won’t ask you to solve algorithm problems or write code on the whiteboard, as we already said. However, we might use the whiteboard to have you draw out how you think a system should be built. Whiteboard coding is usually done by people who have done it a lot of times before. At Slack, this isn’t part of the day-to-day job.
Just to be clear, we don’t write down a binary search algorithm (or any other coding problem) on a whiteboard. We use it to talk about ideas. People are nervous during interviews, and when they are asked to do something they don’t normally do in front of someone judging them, it can make them feel uncomfortable.
Not only do you not need to bring a computer to the interview, but you also don’t need to study for it. A high level view of how you think about building and debugging complex systems is what we want to know. This is not something you can always study for.
Every person you talk to will give you time to ask questions. Keep in mind that you are interviewing us as well as we are interviewing you. From both of our points of view, we want to make sure that Slack is a great place to work that you will enjoy!
The Slack library in our SF office
Nail Your Slack Job Interview With These Tips
FAQ
Are Slack interviews hard?
What is a Slack interview?
How many rounds of interview are there in Salesforce?
What is the interview process like at Slack?
I interviewed at Slack I interviewed in 2021. 1st round is HR, 2nd is Technical with Java, Data Structure, Thread, OOPs normal questions. 3rd round is technical assessment where you need to add feature into existing project. Salesforce has an “exempt” and “non-exempt” employment status.
How can I see who is working on what in slack?
In Slack, you can choose the channel where Time Doctor notifications should appear, and which users will be invited to that channel. And that’s it! You’ll now be able to see who’s working on what in that specific channel.
How long does it take to get a job at Slack?
Photo credit: Slack Slack is overhauling its hiring process for engineers, but it generally looks like this: The length of the whole process varies, depending on the candidate’s availability and the time they take to complete the take-home exercise. In the shortest case, the gap between applying and getting an offer could last a week.
