I was in a recruitment process between April to June 2020 for Engineering Lead at Zalando in Helsinki. The thing I will keep in memory is the professional, organized and friendly way the whole process was conducted by HR, during covid pandemic, with constant feedback and genuine care. Hiring process are a two way street and it´s this kind of management that attracts the best talents to the organizations. I started from not knowing very much about zalando to getting very much interest about the company and feeling excited about working there. The interview process, was a first screen phone with HR, after this another one with the hiring manager, a code exercise, and the final roundup with 3 interview. I believe that these final are normally at their office, but given the covid pandemic they were remote. It was a very nice experience, with a frustrating end result, because I felt that the small hands-on coding questions had more weight, than the leadership, tech and team management skills, which in reality is where we will spend more time. I´ve felt that they value (or wanted) a hands-on coding team leader, instead of a Engineering Manager with leadership and people skills. This makes even less sense, when there was no code hands-on requirement in the Job description. There´s plenty of ways to understand the hands-on required for a manager (architecture, system design, CI/CD, tech stack, hiring, engineering past time, etc) . Coding should not be one of them, because of the right balance needed to have between people and engineering in this leadership positions. Overall, it was great with room to improve in this code thing.

The whole process lasted 3 - 4 weeks. Below is the process: 1) HR phone call lasting 30 minutes 2) Off-site video call lasting 1 hour 3) On-site interview (3 interviews) 1 hour each 4) Offer and negotiation Paperwork delivered within a week of offer