I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Booking.com (Amsterdam) in Nov 2016
Interview
booking.com has a very simple recruitment process for their technology department:
1. Hackerrank Test (4 programming problems to be solved in 75 mins)
2. Screening Interview (simple screening)
3. Telephonic Interview (1 DS problem, 1 Objective-C problem)
4. Onsite Interview (4 interviews in a row)
Onsite interview involve following rounds:
1. HR Interview
2. iOS Interview (in depth)
3. Data Structure Interview (in depth)
4. FIT Interview (culture fit)
I applied for iOS Developer position and went through all the steps of recruitment process.
The experience was positive from the start as I got the opportunity to directly interact with booking.com team as well as exploring Amsterdam.
However, the bad part I felt was slow response of recruitment team. Unfortunately my recruiter didn't come back to me after onsite interview (huge disappointment). He committed to reply within a day, but until today I didn't get any response after multiple followup emails. I contacted their office after two weeks, there I got the news that position is filled by another candidate. I have asked for constructive feedback it is useless because they won't get back.
Overall I had a good exposure. Interviewers were very friendly and helping in all the stages. But recruitment team made very bad impression at the end.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Architecture design of first two screens of booking.com app.
Photoshop has a function fill color that will fill color inside a given shape.
You need to write a method that fill color. This method takes 2d array, coordiates x, y from where it will start filling the color inside whole shape. If any of the coordiante is already filled with color, leave it and move ahead.
fill_color(int arr[][], int x, int y)
The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Booking.com (London, England)
Interview
DON’T WASTE YOUR TIME! If you’re iOS developer and you feel your time is so precious, then I recommend you that please don’t waste your time on Booking.com. I guess they don’t have any openings and they keep rejecting candidates based on very tiny mistake in the interview, not sure if they want to hire Machines instead of humans. I feel they may be posting jobs to keep traction in the market. I applied through online. They sent me online coding test. Then there was short call with hiring manager, followed by live coding problem solving with two iOS Developers from Amsterdam. I had a problem solving round and it was really great and I was so confident that I would get into next round, however after the 3 days I got a rejection email saying that candidate did not tell correct time complexity in first attempt. Also Although I supported of edges cases, in feedback they say I only supported basic solution and it was very very frustrating, I swear I did not support only one last very complex edge case because we were already out of time but rest of the edge cases were supported. Anyway we have to respect their decision as they’re GOD.
Worst interview ever.
I applied on their website. First, the HR contacted you and sent you the wrong HackerRank challenge. Then they sent you the correct challenge. After the challenge, HR late for the scheduled call and told you no vacancies available for the current team.
Referred me to another team but then rejected me after the second call.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Normal questions what do you know about the company, why us.
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Booking.com (Amsterdam) in Nov 2020
Interview
First I was contacted by a recruiter on LinkedIn and I agreed to have a short chat with her about my experience.
The second phase was a hackerrank test with 4 questions (I posted them below). They can also be found online. The time limit was 75 minutes I think.
For the third phase I had another chat with the HR person. Not really sure why, it was only to confirm that I want to move to Amsterdam.
The fourth phase was a technical phone interview. In my opinion this part was the worst. It was also the one I failed. They ask you a algo/data structures question and a iOS question (I posted both below). I think that they don't allocate enough time for these questions, since in my case the algo question was a hard leetcode question. For the iOS question they just have you write code but without giving any sort of explanation. I know you have to ask clarifying questions but in this case every time I asked something it was answered with another question. The fact that the interviewers had the charisma of a match stick didn't help either.
All in all it was a negative experience. I was even more let down at the end when they told me they don't write unit tests for the code that they write...
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Hackerrank questions were:
- group anagrams
- check if a list of strings is a polygon
- delta decoding
- a rounding question