What Is a Phone Screen?

Full Definition

The phone screen (sometimes 'technical phone screen' or TPS) is the bridge between OA and onsite loop. It is the first live human conversation, and the bar is roughly 'can this person solve a LeetCode medium in 30-40 minutes while explaining their thinking'. The format is typically: 5-10 minutes of small talk and resume review, 30-40 minutes of coding on a shared editor (CoderPad most common, sometimes a Google Doc for legacy reasons), 5-10 minutes for candidate questions. The interviewer is usually a current employee on or near the target team — sometimes a senior IC, sometimes a manager. The problem difficulty varies: at Google and Meta it's usually a LeetCode medium (occasionally medium-hard), at Amazon it's often a medium combined with behavioral questions tagged to LPs, at smaller startups the bar can be lower (an easy combined with a deeper systems question). Phone screen pass rates are typically 40-60%. Common failure modes: silent coding (forgetting to think out loud), jumping to code without clarifying the problem, getting stuck on edge cases without acknowledging the brute force version first, and not testing the solution against the example before declaring it done.