Shortly after responding to a LinkedIn inmail for an open position as a Senior DevOps Engineer in the Bucharest branch, I received a phone call from the recruiting HR staff member which asked me some questions around desired salary, reasons for my current employer departure and the soonest date I could join their company.
Also she shortly described the company, the team, the interview process and the benefits and perks of the job. The whole phone call interview lasted 15 minutes.
The enticing part of the perks was revolved around Tradeshift listing on the US stock exchange market and their ability to issue its employees with a stock option plan.
1st technical interview was scheduled shortly after the HR interview and was done via Zoom call with 2 managers (one from Bucharest site and the second from Copenhagen).
Initial technical interview lasted for 1 hour and it consisted with the presentation of the team and their objectives, the tools and the technologies that are used on a daily basis and also the teams next steps in achieving full automated microservices delivery workflows in cloud,
Second part of the interview consisted of medium difficulty questions around the technologies that I've specified in the CV and also into my introductory speech.
Also some questions around:
- AWS managed services such as ASGs, IAM, EKS and some others
- Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, ELK, Grafana, Prometheus
- CI/CD workflows and processes
Overall the 1st tech interview went great, I felt that my skillset of several Cloud certifications, 5 years as a Senior DevOps and 8 years overall in IT matched their need, also the managers feedback, from my opinion, was also good; just to be shocked by the fact that the HR staff went into complete radio silence mode for 2 whole weeks, before getting my feedback over email in which they stated the a former employee returned to the company and it felt naturally for them to close the position.
I wouldn't be as disappointed as I am right now not knowing that the whole 'former employee returning' email was just a template. One of my friends also had his interviewing process shortly after mine for the same job and he received the same email template as I did 2 weeks after I've received it.
I hope this isn't a corporate mandated lie and it's just a rogue HR staff which deemed I'm not enough of a grown-up to handle the rejection. I am very annoyed of how Romanian HR staff treat their job applicants and I wish I read the reviews here on Glassdoor before even applying.