I had submitted applications for software engineering positions multiple times, most of them not making it past the very first selection round, but eventually 1 application made it past the initial selection process and I was sent a link to complete step #1: a one-way video interview.
In this interview you will get a handful of questions that you will need to answer, and it's just you answering questions, so it's a little bit weird if it's your first time doing this. You only get 3-5 minutes to answer per question, but every question has the option for you to re-record, so that's super useful if you somehow lose your train of thought, stumble, or have any other issues.
After the one-way video round, I received an invitation to schedule an interview with a recruiter, the usual type of recruiter interview. They were very helpful and clear about the whole process, also after this round the recruiter was really responsive during the next steps.
After the recruiter interview I was asked to give some availability, within a day after doing so I received 3 invitations for 3 different interviews. For me these were all scheduled on separate days, and Progressive suggests doing so to not have multiple interviews all on 1 day, which makes sense.
These interviews were 1 technical round and 2 rounds with managers, each round had 2 people from Progressive join the interview.
The technical round is mostly conversational, which is something I prefer. No need to worry about Leetcode or other algorithm kind of gotcha tests. The only thing here I would've liked is if the questions / conversation would've been slightly more leaning towards talking about experience.
All interviews are broken up in sections, or competency areas if you will, so for this engineering role it was broken up into things like backend questions, frontend questions, general OOP questions. Examples: "Are you familiar with SOLID principles?" and "what are the 4 principles of object-oriented programming?"
The manager rounds are 1-hour long interviews that follow the S.T.A.R. format, so make sure you have some work stories ready that you can tell in this format.
In the end I unfortunately did not receive an offer. I did receive feedback explaining it was a highly competitive pool, and that other candidates were stronger in some areas in the technical round. I also received feedback about the areas where I did do well, so overall that was very useful and definitely sets Progressive apart from virtually any other company on the planet that will either ghost you or send you the generic "thanks but no thanks" email without anything helpful or useful.
