Was reached to by a recruiter, had the initial call which was great, my next round was with an engineering manager who didn't seem skilled enough to run the interview or nudge the candidate to get the information/criteria they wanted to see, was basically asking silly generic open-ended buzzwordy corporate questions that don't mean anything, like "describe situation where you showed ownership/leadership", "a situation where you had a conflict and how you overcame it or how you changed someone else's mind", overall seemed very manipulative and indirect with all the question and what they wanted to figure out. Engineers don't go around their 10+ year career thinking "Ah! I remember this situation in this specific project from 8 years ago where I showed ownership and convinced my manager to use that technology", its something we do on the day to day job and don't take notes of because we're not NPCs, I can barely remember the name of the company or project I worked at 2 years ago let alone specific situations.. Interviewers aren't skilled enough to be conducting the interviews as they can't seem to get what they want out of candidates or nudge candidates in the right direction, they seem to have an annoying smirk like they get an ego kick out of setting candidates to fail, judging by their employee reviews I'm not surprised its all about bad manipulative managers.. I've had more than 7 ex-colleagues go through personio's process and they've all reported having a negative experience, some were even downlevelled from the positions they applied for citing "scale" as a reason which is outright disrespectful as our previous company dealt with more scale and customers than Personio ever will. The comments about them keeping high level positions warm to the ex-facebook/google folks seem to be quite accurate, I have friends/college class-mates that fit that criteria even though they have less years of experience, quality in these years of experience and technical knowledge or experience with modern technologies and tools than myself or said candidates. I guess the "scale" excuse is the most polite way to say so. Its not like the same code that serves a 1000 customer can also serve millions anyway. You're judged by how cool your previous company was rather than the skills, knowledge and experience you bring to the table, here's a secret, people at big tech companies work with context domain specific tech rather than actual open source tools that are marketable.. Apparently 8 years of building buttons and maintaining dead projects at big tech companies with outdated company specific technologies that don't exist outside of the company and building nothing new is worth so much, who knew

The process was structured and well-thought-out. All the interviewers were super engaged, respectful and open to answering all the questions. The recruiter was also very responsive, and it was genuinely apparent that the recruiter was on my side and wanted me to succeed. Overall, one of the most positive experiences I had.