5y
We are sorry to hear that your experience with us has not been positive, and do appreciate your frank feedback. Your review is quite thorough and touches on a few points, which we would like to address one by one.
First of all, we recognise that a hiring process of 7+ weeks is too long and we have been working on reducing this without sacrificing quality and candidate experience. We have, since then, added a more careful tracking of the duration between each steps, as well as regular communications to clarify expectations. The evaluation and interviews are done by actual engineers, and scheduling their time has been challenging. I believe we are much better now. Also, having an additional point of contact in this process – the recruiter – tends to add some delays, so we encourage interested candidates with time constraints to apply directly at careers@niometrics.com.
Regarding the exercises, of course the performance of implementation weights a lot. However, as we do not want to burden candidates with too many, they have to be a small minority. A lot of our non-implementation questions are of the type "can you spot the bug?”, so they are buggy and hide traps on purpose. We try to keep it interesting using real bugs.
On the interview itself, we apologise if it exceeded the amount of time you set aside for it, or if you felt that the interview should have covered a different set of topics. We make it a point to share as much as we can about us as well, to help candidates make an informed decision. We believe a thorough interview is good for both sides, to ensure the selected candidate will not have problems integrating with the existing teams, and will enjoy working with us.
For technical positions, we indeed check for all technologies we use. However, it is not required to know them all – and probably nobody in the company does. The purpose of such questions is for us to understand in which team and how the candidate would fit best.
Finally, in general studies do not stop us from hiring someone, but we would be careful to hire an exceptional student, because juggling studies and learning about a new role may be too challenging. Paid internships are another option for exceptional cases, and would come with no obligations.
We hope this gives you some clarity into our recruitment decision-making process. We know applying for a job takes a lot of time and effort, and we are always trying to improve the candidate experience, regardless of the outcome. Your feedback will be very useful in helping us do that.