I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Booking.com in Mar 2013
Interview
Interview with the recruiter, then interview at their offices in Amsterdam.
Interview with recruiter, as always, was a piece of cake, while interview at Booking was difficult and quite silly (writing code with a pencil on white paper).
Also, the person conducting the interview was clearly not wanting to be there and he told me direct that he though it was really boring being at interview. He didn't show any enthusiasm about the company, he had all signs of somebody done with it, near to leave the company (very sarcastic guy)
First telephone interview - general HR questions
Then the second was over Skype - technical with two of their developers. First part was more business related - metrics, A/B testing, conversions, etc.
Everything was ok, the guys are friendly and polite. Unfortunately I did have a mind-block moment, so I failed on writing the script (and it was a simple one)
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
A/B testing
Different monitoring/metrics related to their business
Write a script for form validation
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Booking.com (Moscou, ) in Sep 2013
Interview
After sending my CV I received a JS task from booking's junior recruiter. Nothing special: to sort an array of objects, make a list of items and divide it into 3 columns. Add oncl1ck event to each item and put some data from item to a div. I was allowed to use any JS library. I used jQuery.
In a couple of days a got a mail that test was ok and they call me back next week. After a week of waiting i got another mail that my test was okay and that they'll call me back (again! same info but in other words:))
In a couple of days HR called me. We talked about my experience as a fronend dev. Why I want to work in booking.com? What is A/B testing?
The next day I had a phone interview with 2 guys from dev team. It took about 40-50 minutes. We talked about my daily workfrow at my current job (digital agency based in Moscow, Russia).
Then JS questions: scope, global variables, closures, event delegation (with practical example).
HTML+CSS questions: what is doctype, what happens if you don't provide it. Diff between display:block, display:inline, display:inline-block. Diff between position:absolute, position:relative. Other position values? What is the default one?
How to improve page loading speed?
Business questions: what is A/B testing? What are you going to measure on a booking confirmation page? On page next after confirmation page? I need to mention that I never used A/B testing, so I only knew some theory.
How to improve front-end part of booking.com? What i would do on my first working day?
Sometimes guys let me know if i'm answered correctly. Sometimes they just moved on to next question. I guess HR was also on the phone line because she checked her schedule for this tech interview.
In 3 days received letter that i failed. Here is a part from it:
At this time we regret to inform you that we cannot offer you an interview at our office.
Overall the interview went well. The interviewers were impressed with your JS knowledge and knowledge of optimization techniques. They however felt that you are missing the user focus and commercial awareness that is required for this role.
We will keep your resume and profile in our applicant database and encourage you to keep Booking.com in mind when considering future opportunities.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
All questions about A/B testing. Just because of a lack of practice.