I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Omnea (London, England) in Dec 2025
Interview
Initial screening with external recruiter. Follow-up conversation with internal recruiter. Live paired technical coding session with an engineer.
The early stages were straightforward and professionally handled. Communication from the recruiters was clear, and the process moved at a reasonable pace.
However, the live paired coding session was where the experience deteriorated. During the exercise, the engineer introduced suggestions mid-implementation that redirected the approach. Under time pressure, this caused confusion and led the solution down an unproductive path. When I raised that the suggestions had disrupted the flow of the task, the response was that they were “just suggestions” and I did not need to follow them.
In a live pairing context, especially during assessment, guidance carries implicit weight. Introducing direction and later distancing from it created an unclear evaluation environment. The experience felt less like collaborative problem-solving and more like being tested on how well I could filter ambiguous input while coding under pressure.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How do you manage decisions when there is no clear requirements?
It was very quick and seamless. The Omnea team are really good at understanding if this really is the role for you. In the end, they decided that the work wasn't actually going to light me up. Hiring is very important to them, so they do it right.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How would you build a hiring pipeline in a similar way to that of a sales pipeline?
Lovely interviewer. Standard questions. For sales associate role. Asked about my motivations, my past, and my experience working in sales. Did first round but didn't progress to second round sadly.
