I recently flunked the initial phone screen for an Senior iOS Developer position with Allstate and thought it would be useful to recap the experience for the next victim coming down the interview chute. If you go to the Apple app store, you’ll see there are a number of apps listed there for Allstate (at least seven, by my count). The role I was interviewing for was as a mobile engineer on the main Allstate Mobile app. Because I wasn’t local to Northbrook, the phone screen consisted of me on a conference call with at least four, possibly five people at the same time. The way the interview was set up was the first half was the standard interview questions (“describe a project you had difficulty with and how you solved it”), the second half was a mobile architect shooting questions my direction. He asked me to choose which language was my favorite (I stated Objective-C, since the transition between Swift 2/3/4 could be painful and/or require quite a bit of refactoring for any larger project), and he then proceeded to ask me domain knowledge questions incorporating both iOS programming languages. I’ve recapped a few of ones he busted me on below. Panel conference calls are always a fun (or more precisely, NOT fun) challenge as the audience ranges from the very technical over to the daydreaming HR representative, so trying to come up with the best answer for these questions while appealing to everyone can be a little intimidating. But hopefully my experience flunking the Allstate interview process will help you to prepare for your interviewing day. If you find any of these notes helpful, please let me know by voting “Yes” on the Helpful button below. This helps to motivate me to be as detailed as possible in my recaps. And good luck to you if you decide to go for a job at Allstate!