Fragen im Vorstellungsgespräch bei Canonical

This is the most laborious interview process I have ever done. There has been some uproar on the internet regarding this interview approach. The reason I keep doing it was that I assume I will get an opportunity on working on interesting challenges and projects from the big-name Canonical. I also assume Canonical is an engineering-oriented company that will offer a reasonable package for good engineers. The first step of the interview was a written interview tell me about yourself style essay with multiple pointers on questions that we should cover. I was naively doing that because I was still expecting can get good interesting work if I can join the company. Time spent: at least 3 hours. The second part is some kind of psychological test. It is the first time in my experience I am doing this for the recruitment process. But I was not fully against the idea. Time spent: 1 hour. After that finally, I spoke with a real human for my first interview. It was just small talk get to know each other interview style. It was a good conversation. Time spent: 30 minutes. Next, I attended another call with another senior engineer to test my Golang skills. It was nice to interview. The interviewer is friendly and really informative. Time spent: 1 hour. After that, I attended another call with another engineer to test my automation and DevOps experience. The guy is the best. He is even more friendly than the first interviewer. He discusses many things around DevOps and automation. Time spent: 1 hour. After finishing that call, I naively thought I reached the end of the interview process. An HR call is scheduled which will share the logistic and benefits of working at Canonical. But after I email again, actually I still need to attend 3-4 more interviews. It is actually crazy to go through 7 interviews for a job. On top of that, I get a take-home assignment of implementing some applications which need to support some concurrency. No deadline but they expect me to finish in 2-4 hours. I was spending almost 8 hours on the take-home. I shouldn't, but I am just excited and want to make sure I deliver close to the production quality of code. Once I finish then I submit the take-home task. Time spent: 8 hours. The HR call was good, the HR person is really nice. I found out in this HR call that I will be hired as a contractor because Canonical has no registered company in my country. I am expecting this from the beginning and no surprise. Next HR is asking about my expected package given the contracting role. I was giving a range which is the range on another offer (which is a non-contractor role) that I have. The HR looks taken aback. In that call, HR also tells, that a stock option is discretionary. Time spent: 45 minutes. After the HR conversation, I got to know that the employee benefit is minimal as a contractor. I feel that the role might not fit me. I am currently working full time, with full benefit. So I see no strong reason why I should sacrifice my current job pay and benefit to join Canonical. Hence I will probably not going to proceed. However, I am still wondering how much base pay that at least they want to negotiate. Two days later, I got an email from the hiring manager telling me that they decide not to proceed with my candidacy. I found this totally weird because, before the HR call, they said I will still attend 3-4 other calls. I am under the impression they doing so because they are not willing to match the pay range I mentioned. It is a blessing in disguise because at least I don't need to waste 3-4 more interview time just to get an offer that is not competitive. In total, I spent at least 15 hours in this process. The important lesson I gain is regardless of how enthusiastic I am about a company, it is better not to over-commit to the recruitment process. I will avoid this kind of laborious recruitment process in the future. I also should have clarified the salary requirement from the beginning.

Before I even had the chance to speak to a human being from this company, I was asked to send in an essay based on 30+ questions like "how did you do in arts in high school". This company seriously needs to review their hiring process and open their eyes to what is currently going on in the job market. Their process for sure sorts out candidates - but not the right ones...

The hiring process was divided into multiple segments. There was a initial screening, a home assignment, and a few remote interviews with HR and engineers. The interviews were quite pleasant! People were really nice and I they were not only testing if I was a good fit for the role, but also trying to give me an overview of the job and the company, to help me make a decision later.

Too lengthy. At first, there's an essay to be written, after that there's an aptitude test, then a culture interview, take home test, tech interview. It's time consuming, and tiresome.

Everything posted by people previously is exactly true. Same questions are asked and same procedure. Even the technical assessment is same, develop a command line application for python. However, I wish I had just asked to stop the process earlier if I was going to be treated like this. You go through so many interviews and at the end all of a sudden, you just receive a generic email stating that "We are not progressing with your application further". You don't even know what was the reason for this after progressing through the processes. I am fully aware and understand that rejections are a part of this process. However, it feels unfair and non empathetic when you put someone in a long time consuming process and then don't even provide feedback to explain at which stage there was a problem.

If you can sell, avoid applying. The time investment to respond to a survey in writing prior to any phone screens is likely not worth the benefits of working here.

A lot of tests , paperwork and no return , no response despite my 3 email asking for an update. Very very disappointing..test were long , paperwork took me 4 hours.

A personality and intelligence online test first then move forward to the second round. But it is yet to happen. So I'm here to look for tips and prepare for the upcoming interview.

They've a very very long hiring process. I'd to do a lot of assessments for more than a month and in the end they didn't progress towards my interview. All in all I felt like I wasted a lot of my valuable time with them.

My thought on their hiring process is that they want to put the least amount of effort to get the best candidates. It felt very one-sided. During the interview process, all interviewers were white men and had a quite condescending attitude towards interviewee. Company as big as Canonical usually put more efforts to the presentation of interview pannels so this felt quite lazy.