I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Gusto in Feb 2022
Interview
I had an initial technical interview over the phone using CoderPad. The call was an hour long. I imagine it went well since they wanted to follow up with more interviews.
I then had five more interviews. Five. A total of six for the whole process. Each one at least an hour long.
The 2nd interview was a bunch of HR-type questions where find out how you jive with their "company values".
The 3rd was more conversational where I was asked about my work experience.
The 4th was another CoderPad exercise similar to the first. I thought I did well on this.
The 5th. Another CoderPad exercise. I had this one after a full day of work and got tripped up on the problem, even though over the weekend I went back at the problem on my own and figured it out.
The last interview is a design interview on a Miro board. This tests your architecture and design skills. I thought I did well on this.
The recruiter gave me a relatively quick rejection, but did not give me any feedback. They even said not to ask for feedback.
This seems antithetical to one of their values - "Share openly, question respectfully, and once a decision is made, commit fully." I can't get better if you don't share with me why you didn't hire me.
While I don't see the need to have *three* CoderPad exercises when one would suffice, the problems were relevant to their domain, so they weren't just randomly picked off of LeetCode.
Everyone I spoke to was nice and treated me with respect.
Six to seven hours is a lot of one person's time. They could easily trim their process down to three interviews: 1) a conversational one about experience 2) a "make sure you know how to code" interview 3) a design interview.
From talking to folks, it sounds like they're aware that they are a feature factory, but they want to move away from that style of work. They have a Rails monolith that they are currently wrestling with.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Calculate the taxable amount for a salary taking different tax brackets into account.
Distribute income to a number of recipients evenly and don't overpay anyone.
Design a social polling app
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Gusto (New York, NY) in Jun 2025
Interview
Initial recruiter phone call followed by technical phone screen. Question was a simple data parsing to extract/aggregate JSON data. Interview was friendly, and wrapped up with closing questions. I received a rejection email a week later, with no details.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given the following JSON data, aggregate statistics based on the request.
I applied online. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Gusto in Mar 2025
Interview
I was surprised by how cumbersome this interview was, several rounds, on top of take home project. It's really rigorous for a company that isn't FAANG level. Honestly a take home and a discussion of a take home is enough technical signal, instead its take home, coding, take home extension live and systems design, plus values and behavioral session. It's a huge time investment for pay and benefits that are not very competitive.
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Gusto (New York, NY) in Jan 2025
Interview
medium difficulty, or easier if you look up the q+a's before. one interviewer was late, and had the nerve to mark off points for time. so i did not get a job.
1
Gusto interviews FAQs
Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Gusto with 3 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 43% positive. To compare, the company-average is 50.4% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Software Engineer roles take an average of 23 days to get hired, when considering 86 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Gusto overall takes an average of 24 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Gusto as a Software Engineer according to 86 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 35%
One on one interview: 22%
Skills test: 17%
Presentation: 9%
Background check: 5%
Personality test: 5%
Group panel interview: 3%
Drug test: 3%
IQ intelligence test: 2%
Other: 1%
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