I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Coolblue (Róterdam)
Interview
First the video call with the HR employee and your typical screening questions, what do you do, etc., as well as talking about the company and the benefits.
Then came the second video interview, which was with both the Team Lead and a Senior member of the team. They only cared about how my current company works, and not on my actual skills. A lot of questions about "how do you do X in your current job?" instead of how I have done it in the past/how would I do it right now. Unfortunately, my current job is not that good (makes sense why I'm trying to move) and I don't agree with a lot of things, so these questions put me in a really bad situation, which ultimately led to my rejection. This is literally their feedback:
"Still many things are done manually. You don't have an automated process for baking and deploying EC2 instances. You didn't seem to have insights into what applications/teams spend which costs."
That doesn't look like you were evaluating me at all, more like I was rejected because of the bad practices of my company. It's a shame that you didn't even bother to ask me how would I go about solving these issues if I had the chance, not even asked a proper technical question. I suggest that you strongly reevaluate how you do technical interviews.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
How do you manage EC2 instances at your current company?
I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Coolblue (Róterdam) in Jun 2018
Interview
Coolblue was the best company throughout all of the steps of my application. I have received extremely helpful and very intense information about Coolblue, the position I am applying for and about living and relocating to the Rotterdam. I'd highly recommend applying to Coolblue especially for engineers that are planning to relocate to the Netherlands.
Their onsite interview was quite soft which includes things like city tour with bikes, physical store visits, office tour, lunch with the team and so on. You're with them the whole day, but challenging part only takes an hour.
Even though I didn't get any offer at the end of the day, I can still tell that my experience was very positive.
As a constructive feedback, I might suggest Coolblue, to provide more concrete information about the reasoning behind the rejection. Asking candidates bunch of questions that don't have a single correct answer, and stating that the technical knowledge is not up to par at the end is not helpful. Take notes and try to state which answers you didn't like and what would be the correct approach/answer. Candidates are already applying to jobs knowing that they can be rejected. Just let them know why they did fail so they don't get confused. Being more transparent at the end will not hurt anybody.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How could you convince a different team to use different technologies?
