I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Booking.com in Jan 2019
Interview
I applied on the company website.
Arrange a call with Tech recruiter that turned out to be very positive about my application.
A second call with the data science team dealt with a specific project I had worked on and a business case.
In one day I received a negative feedback on a wide set of features. It seemed to me that the evaluation was a bit too oversimplified, since I had no specific feeling of the negative feedback during the interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How to analytically deal with a change in the cancel policy in terms of user behaviour and business impact
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Booking.com (Amsterdam) in Nov 2021
Interview
1) HR interview (30 min)
2) Hiring Manager (30 min)
3) Technical interview with 2 Sr. DS: prepared ML-business case (1 hour)
4) Technical interview with 2 Sr. DS: live ML-business case
(1 hour)
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
the 1st ML-case was about creation of recommenation blocks on home page - what data to use to train model, why it is important, bla-bla. It was given 3 days before interview.
the 2nd case was given during the interview, it was about building ML model to predict in how many days from today (if any) the hotel will be fully booked for given range of search dates.
What I did not like about interview process:
1) People's accent when they speak English. It was my 1st experience of interview in such intl. company, and I was a bit shocked about their accent. I really could understood 10% of what one indian guy tried to tell me. The same problem was with another french woman (firstly, I thought she was asking me smth in french)
2) I feel I have failed the 2nd interview with online ML-case because it is hard to figure out the solution without thinking at least couple of minutes. It was not a standard ML setup, you need to figure out how the data should look like, the target etc. However, those guys did not give me that time, instead they started asking me some irrelevant questions about how gradient boosting works, why it is better than RF etc. just wasting my time.
3) I do not know why, but all of them asked me the same question about my last project I worked on current job. So I told this story 3 times.
4) Finally, they did not provide me with any feedback after 1+week from the last interview. For me, it is the worst signal about company. I spent several days making presentation, meeting those random people, and they could not send me final E-mail.
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Booking.com in Sep 2020
Interview
Applied via a referral and the referral transferred me to a recruiter. The recruiter was extremely inflexible in planning a call with me. The only time they were available was 7:30am my local time--and that was later than their original proposal. Once we were finally on the call, the connection was really bad but the recruiter didn't even try to make sure I could understand what they were saying. The call itself was a bit disorganized with the recruiter opening with relocation benefits and salary rather than a description of the role. I didn't get invited to proceed to the next round even though my background is a reasonable fit for the role. Overall impression was the recruiter had a 9-5 mentality and was just going through the motions to get me off the call.