How to get hired at Revolut

Revolut is an interesting animal. A unicorn, to be precise, that seems a bit cult-like. Having worked for companies with a very strong corporate culture myself, I actually do see this as a distinct competitive advantage, although at times it can lead to the “not invented here” syndrome. It is part of the cult to create high barriers to entry, so it is fascinating to observe the hiring processes at these types of organizations.

Last year, Revolut took heat in Spain for a clumsy hiring ploy asking applicants to source 200 new accounts to be considered.

Naturally, this caused a little bit of a backlash, ending with a Revolut spokesperson contacting Crowdfundinsider, which covered the story, after the practice had been withdrawn:

“The home task has been removed as it does not reflect our company values. We have reached out personally to the candidate to apologise, and to thank her for bringing this to our attention. We will be developing alternate ways to test candidates’ ability for future home tasks.”

So this is old news. It is an improvement of sorts that the company apparently has moved on to a data science challenge that is currently circulating among the Japanese community (in case you were wondering, no, I did not apply). It is available at this link, although I assume it will be moved once this article gets discovered. Apparently, this challenge is given to candidates for the Japan CEO position.

That’s a long-winded story, please get to the point! Well, the point is that on Kaggle, there has been a data science challenge for the last five months, which allegedly describes an exercise used by fellow European unicorn N26. And that just happens to be identical.

Judging from the timing the information has been accessible to me, Revolut seems to have copied from N26, but it might well be the other way around. Who knows. Both companies will grow up, achieve “decacorn” status and be with us for a long time. Just allow us to be amused for a moment at this adolescent behavior.

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