I have got contacted via Linkedin and was asked to send my CV to Hilti. After 2 months I received an invitation for a skype interview with an HR and then with a Regional Manager. The interviews were casual and nice conversations which I enjoyed a lot. The questions were related to my previous experience, my life, travels, education, languages I speak and my future aspirations.
I was selected for the Assessment Center in 2 weeks after the second interview. The Assessment Center was overall a pleasant experience which was very well structured and organized, full of great people and interesting tasks (all costs covered by Hilti).
The Feedback:
The feedback was overall unstructured and unclear. They pointed out that I was too international (move between countries too much), did not change the tone of my voice enough while presenting, I overall speak too much and I did not answer some questions (they could not tell which questions I didn't answer when I asked). The most constructive feedback was about reassurance - I did not ask often if I am understood or if I need to clarify my arguments. Overall, I scored 3 on average out of 4 on their scale, improvement areas were not presented and important areas not emphasized.
In general, even though the selection criteria were hard to understand, especially because they selected one lady who jumps/runs away whenever she hears the sound of a drill. I believe that people who were ready to stay in their own countries in the long term were preferred. Also being fluent in Russian was a factor since the HQ for Eastern Europe is in Moscow, hence all 3 of the selected candidates spoke in Russian fluently.
Final Remarks:
I went to the assessment center not exactly wanting to work in the company, especially because it was pointed out that moving to Moscow would be necessary in the longer term. However, being there and meeting the people, I was impressed by the corporate culture and overall quality of personnel that they have: they were open, had sense of humor, challenging, inspiring and emitted love for the company (many of them worked for Hilti for more than 10 years). Overall, Hilti seemed like a great place to work and the "final 12" who were selected for the AC where encouraged to apply again. Nevertheless, I left with doubts regarding flexibility and possibilities to move between countries as different people were sending different messages and my feedback seemed to have clashed with what was advertised for this position. They were also quite secretive about the salary (for the same position in Austria the salary of 35k euros was advertised, for other regions, especially Eastern, Central Europe and the Baltics, the salary wasn't discussed. I sensed that the salaries were overall too low when taking into account the level of education of the candidates (our field trip guys mentioned something around 1500 euros per month after taxes in Moscow).