I mentioned my interview process with HolidayCheck on my previous post. I mentioned HolidayCheck, because it was different than any of my previous interviews.

I had a long hiring process with multiple steps. Different interviewers got involved in the recruitment process, which ensures that both parties are certain about what they value.

First step was an interview with the two developers from the company. This says a lot about the company and its management style, as I mentioned in my post interviewer. It wasn’t like an interview at all. It was more like having a good tech conversation with colleagues while drinking beer. We had chance to learn from each other during this conversation. We mostly talked about frameworks we use, things we like to do, how we catch up with technology. One of the interviewers suggested me to read Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship and I really liked the book.

The second step was an interview with head of engineering. This step was also a friendly conversation, but this time interviewer had some tricky questions for me on real life issues. The good thing about this step, actually the interviewer helped me to look on the right direction. By brainstorming with the interviewer, I figured out his technical depth and personality. Even in the second step, I knew a lot about the company.

Third step was the first coding interview. Two interviewers wanted me to resolve a simple problem. I tried to resolve the problem with tiny steps with TDD. Each time I stuck, interviewers asked questions to make me think and this helped me to overcome the problem. After I am done with the task, Wolfram reviewed my code comprehensively. Shown my upsides and downsides. Getting these valuable feedbacks was far more important than the interview itself.

I finally had a meeting with the HR people on the fourth step. In Turkey, first interview is with HR most of the time, if you share the company’s values, then you can interview with tech people. In HolidayCheck it was other way around. First three steps already told me a lot about the company. In this step, I already knew whether I am a satisfactory candidate for HolidayCheck.

Lastly, I had an onsite program with company, a pair programming session and lunch with the future colleagues included. I also had an interview with a colleague from completely different department, just to evaluate me on company values. So many people got involved in the recruitment process. People tend to see recruitment process as burden, but at HolidayCheck it was totally different. Everyone was excited to meeting a candidate, future colleague.

The whole process was long, I had so many interviews, but the upside is, I enjoyed all of the interviews. Company learned a lot from me and I learned a lot from the company. At my first day in the HolidayCheck, I already knew some colleagues (9 to be exact), on-boarding process was so smooth for me.