How I Got My Job As One Of Facebook's First 30 Employees

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Getting a job at Facebook is now very difficult and competitive.

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What was the interview process like in the early days?

Noah Kagan, who now runs product promotion company AppSumo, was employee #30 at Facebook. In his e-book, "How I Lost $170 Million," he details how he landed an one of the first jobs at the company as a non-Harvard student without knowing a single employee.

Kagan, then 24, applied for Facebook blindly through the website from his desk job at Intel. He was surprised to hear back from a Facebook recruiter soon after he hit submit.

The first step of his interview was a phone call with the recruiter. Topics covered were "yoga, the college market and past work experience," Kagan writes. Kagan passed and was asked to visit Facebook's University Avenue office in Palo Alto.

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"Upon entering, the office was a hybrid of fraternity house and office," Kagan recalls of the 3rd floor startup. "Wooden Ikea desks were spread wherever they could fit in, cables were falling from the ceiling providing power outlets to all the computers and everyone was on the latest Macbooks and huge monitors."

Kagan was interviewing for a product management position, so he studied up on a bunch of Facebook features and prepared notes on how to improve them. He says the in-person interview was "easier" than he expected. He was asked questions that tested his personality more than his skill set. Kagan interviewed with Ezra Callahan, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, and an early Yahoo employee, Doug Hirsch.

After two weeks and three rounds of interviews, Kagan was offered the job: $60,000 and 20,000 stock options. He didn't meet Mark Zuckerberg until his first day at Facebook. It was a whole other daunting experience.