got the OA + coding screen for a mid-level front-end engineer role at IKEA's digital product org. here's the breakdown.
the online assessment was sent via HackerRank. two coding questions, 90 minutes total. difficulty felt more like LeetCode medium than hard. the first question was a string manipulation / parsing problem. the second was an array / sorting-adjacent question. nothing on graphs or DP. the test platform detected tab-switching, which they disclosed in the instructions.
i finished with about 20 minutes to spare. i submitted passing all test cases. there may have been a third question that unlocked if you finished fast, but i didn't see one. not sure if that's role-dependent.
the live technical screen (which followed the OA about 10 days later) was different in tone. it was on a shared code editor, no auto-grading, and the interviewer wanted to see process. they gave me a problem that was closer to a real front-end task: basically, given an unstructured product data object, write a function that normalizes it for display, handles missing fields gracefully, and writes a couple of unit tests for the edge cases.
this felt like a take-home in live format. they cared a lot about how i handled nulls, what i named things, and whether i thought about error states without being prompted. they explicitly said they don't expect 'perfect code in 45 minutes' and seemed to mean it.
one thing i noticed: they asked about accessibility when discussing the output format. IKEA puts a real emphasis on accessibility in their digital products. if you're applying for a front-end role, even at mid-level, be ready to mention WCAG or aria considerations naturally. not as a checkbox, but as something you actually think about.
overall difficulty: accessible for a solid mid-level. not a grind-200-leetcode situation. focus on code clarity and communication.