Just finished the Unilever online assessment for a software engineer role (new grad pipeline, London, early 2026). Trying to write this up while it's fresh because I couldn't find anything recent and specific.
Platform: HackerRank. Not a surprise, they've been using it for a while apparently.
Time: 90 minutes, 2 questions.
Question 1: Array manipulation, medium difficulty. Nothing exotic. I'd put it at roughly LeetCode medium, leaning easy. Think sliding window or two-pointer territory. Got through this one comfortably with maybe 30 minutes left.
Question 2: A graph problem. BFS or DFS would work, the problem was about finding connected components in a grid. Again, LeetCode medium. Not hard but requires you to actually know your graph traversal.
Both problems had edge cases that mattered for full marks (empty input, single node graph, etc.). Make sure your solutions handle those. The HackerRank scorer is strict about hidden test cases.
No behavioral questions in the OA, no multiple choice, no psychometric tests. Just pure coding. That's different from what I'd heard from a friend who went through their grad programme (Future Leaders Programme) a couple of years ago, apparently that one has a lot more personality/aptitude testing. For the standard SWE track, it was coding only.
Time between submitting OA and hearing back: 9 days. I almost emailed the recruiter on day 8. Don't do that, just wait the 10 days.
If you're prepping: do maybe 15-20 LeetCode mediums with a focus on arrays, strings, and basic graphs. You don't need to go deep on dynamic programming for this stage. That might come up in the later rounds but not here.
Still in the process, fingers crossed for the phone screen.