There’s a lot I could unpack here, but I’ll keep it short (unlike the interview process at Bolt). The interview process at Bolt was one of the most time-consuming, unstructured, and oddly disrespectful hiring processes I’ve encountered in the EU market during past 15 years. The first recruiter call was fine, technically. Minimal human interaction, low energy. It felt less like a conversation and more like a checkbox exercise. Then came the home assignment. I spent a serious amount of time on it, passed it, great feedback, let’s continue. The first interview was the highlight. An interviewer outside of head office: professional, experienced in e-commerce, genuinely good to talk to. We clicked. That was the moment I thought, okay, maybe this is going somewhere. Next step: two interviews. One interviewer proudly announced he has a tendency to go over time. He wasn’t lying. Almost two hours instead of one. It wasn’t an interview so much as a slow roast, highlighting a noticeable gap in interview standards. The next interview was fine, but repetitive. Same questions, different business cases. By the end, I had effectively done the same job six times The process concluded in the traditional way: silence. Follow-up emails quietly vanished. Eventually, months after, a short piece of written feedback appeared, seemingly autogenerated, marking the official end. Overall, a process that managed to consume a lot of time, I feel truly sorry for those who went through it being unemployed. In my case it was rather an excersise and exploration of opportunities