I applied online. The process took 2 days. I interviewed at Toptal (Montreal, QC) in May 2022
Interview
The interviewers are not professional at all, I was quite disappointed.
I followed the standard steps of Toptal process:
1) English proficiency test
2) 3 Codility tests (low to medium level)
3) Technical interview with someone from Toptal. This is the part which for very unprofessional. The person looked like had spent 3 days without sleep, asked me questions like a robot, and I am pretty sure he was not paying attention to whatever I said. Then we went ahead for the live coding part, which they give you 2 tests and you need to solve them in 15min each. I was told I did not need to speak my thoughts out loud and I could just code. So I coded the first test, I was done writing in like 14min, and I ran it for the first time. The output was not correct. By that time, it hit 15min and the interviewer told me "Time is up. It didnt work, did it?" So I say "No, but i think there is only one line wrong, here, now it works" and he told me "Yes, but you needed to complete in 15min, so I wont be able to pass you". The whole time he had his camera turned off, I bet he was not even following the code logic to be able to tell if I was close to the solution or not when the time was up. I felt that was a big waste of time. I checked out other candidates comments here, and I found out that if you pass that step, they give you a ridiculous time consuming take home project, which is basically Toptal asking you to do 20hrs+ of free work.
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Toptal in Oct 2021
Interview
Process consisted of 5 stages:
1. Verification of English level with HR
2. Online algorithms
3. Live algorithms
4. Writing test projects
5. Demo test project
There were nothing of rocket science but you'd better be fast learner and know your field of expertise very well to pass it.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
There were no theoretic questions in my case - all interviews were very practical.
I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Toptal (Cluj-Napoca) in Apr 2021
Interview
You have a pretty lengthy process, not gonna lie, but it's a perfect place to start your freelancer career. Toptal basically helps you with finding the clients and handle paperwork. The first step is and english screening (pretty easy and most of candidates pass this part), then a codility test with fairly simple questions (no graphs, backtracking or DP, just some for loops and some string processing). The third part is an algorithms interview with a screener and the problems are average or slightly harder than average. The final step is a CRUD take-away assignment where they will see your coding style for a production-ready project