Experience
Everything You Need To Know About Our Tech Recruitment Process
Working on a hotel search platform that serves millions of users means that talents at trivago can really have a massive impact on our product and the travel industry as a whole. That’s why we carefully select the best talents from across the world, empowering them to take our product to the next level, while keeping our core values at heart.
Since the majority of our roles at trivago are focused on tech, we thought it might be helpful to share some insight into our tech recruiting process with you. This will give you an idea of what you should expect or prepare once you’ve submitted your application.
In a nutshell, once you’ve applied to one of our tech roles at trivago, you can expect these 4 steps to happen for sure:
However, sometimes there can be some supplementary steps depending on the roles’ requirements and complexity. Even though the recruiting process timeline rely on various factors (e.g. availabilities, visa waiting process in case of onsite interviews, etc.), you can generally expect the process to take between 4-6 weeks.
But first things first! (Start taking notes…)
trivago is a publicly-listed company based in Germany and the technology leader in the industry of hotel and alternative accommodation price comparison (metasearch), creating consumer-centric, test-driven and fast products. Our metasearch empowers users to see what’s out there, compare the possibilities, and confidently choose their ideal accommodation. Find out more about our metasearch product on this page.
Now that you’ve got the business overview as part of your preparation, let’s take a look at the actual recruitment process! There are some steps that can vary from one role to another, but these are the steps you can generally expect from our average recruiting process for the tech roles:
Application: No Robots Here
We usually receive quite a high number of applications, especially for tech roles, and all of them are actually manually reviewed by our recruiters! Don’t be concerned if you don’t get an answer from us right away, as it still takes us quite some time to look through your CV, cover letter (which is not mandatory, but we really appreciate it and we actually do read it) and the answers you give to our application questions (and again yes, we really do pay a lot of attention to those too, especially your answer to “Why do you want this role at trivago?”).
And what else can make your application stand out? Well, make sure we can find a link to the Github repository and don’t forget that keeping your application crisp and clear can already make an impression.
Technical Assessment: Show Us What You’ve Got
Clean code principles, good communication, and explaining the “why” behind your choices are the keys to success.
If you pass the first step, you’ll be one of the lucky ones to receive a technical challenge to complete as the next step. Our technical assessments are coding challenges that are designed to give you insight into what your daily work could be and which challenges our engineering teams are facing in their everyday jobs. Our challenges vary in complexity according to job function and seniority.
The technical assessments we are using are either in-house built take home case study or most of the time, through our partnering platform Codility. You’ll usually get around a week to work on your submission and the length may vary according to how complex the solution can be. We’re always very accommodating with the deadline as the point is not to rush you into a solution, but rather that you spend time on submitting qualitative results. When you submit your solution, a designed pool of engineers will review it and provide us with an evaluation.
Every challenge has a list of standards and criteria that you would need to meet in order to pass to the next step. Clean code principles, good communication, and explaining the“why” behind your choices are the keys to success. We don’t expect the perfect solution, but we are rather keen on seeing your train of thought instead. Afterward, the recruiter will decide whether to move the candidate to the next step or not based on the engineers’ feedback.
Technical Interview: Let’s Dig In
If you pass the case study review, the next step is usually a technical interview of about 60 minutes with our engineers. Depending on the role and the teams, there can be one technical interview or even two interviews, depending on how complex the position is and what each team needs to assess in the process (sometimes there are too many topics to be covered in one single session).
The technical interview will start from your technical assessment, so keep it with you and make sure you review it prior to the interview! The team will follow up on your solution, looking into what you did well and what could be improved. The goal would be eventually to find a better solution together and generally understand your thought process behind your choices (why did you choose a specific coding language, certain framework or technology?).
The second part will be focused on your work-related experiences, critical thinking questions regarding the usage of specific languages or frameworks in the past, or even short live coding exercises. In case of doubt, feel free to ask your recruiter to share more details about what to expect in the interview.
To prepare for the technical discussion you can check our tech blog to read about our use cases and our different engineering approaches to solutions. In most of our job descriptions, you can also find the tech stack used by the team at the moment (if not, you’ll find our complete tech stack listed on the tech blog). We would suggest to check it out before as the questions will most likely be around that specific tech stack. Carefully review the requirements listed in the job description, as well as the most valued skills as some questions might be aimed towards those too.
Even though this step is mostly focused on the technical aspects, we’re also just interested in finding out why you think this is the right opportunity for you and why you’re motivated to join our team.
Final Interview: Seal The Deal
Once you pass the technical round of interviews, the last interview will primarily focus on your soft skills and previous experiences – looking into the way you work in teams, the way you bring your ideas to the table and what your expectations are for this role. Be ready to amaze us with concrete examples of how you interact with your colleagues on specific projects, how you react in conflict situations and how you approach problem-solving. The panel will mostly consist of an HR Business Partner, the Team Lead and/or Hiring Manager for the position, and/or a team member, and/or a product owner.
To prepare for the final interview, we recommend checking our company pages where you can find more details about our culture and values and get insight into how we work. We also have trivago tech and life at trivago Youtube playlists that will give you an inside peek into who works at trivago and what’s it like to work here.
Offer Stage: You Got The Job
After your interviewing process is over, we’ll analyze and discuss the feedback with the hiring team in order to make sure that the best decision is made. If the feedback is positive, we are going to give you the “good news call” and also fill you in on the details and next steps. During this stage, the Business Partner will be your point of contact for all questions regarding your contract, relocation and visa (if necessary).
Once you’ve accepted the offer, you’ll be connected with our Employment Services team to finalise the rest of the paperwork. Need a work permit to work in the EU? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered (here, you can read more about the general visa process)! This talented team deals with new hires from outside of the EU every day and will be able to guide you through the whole process. Of course, the cost related to your visa will also be covered by us.
We know it takes some effort, time and energy to take on a new opportunity and challenge – especially if it’s at a new company, or even more so in a new country or continent. That’s why we’re here to help prepare you by sharing important insights into our recruitment journey for tech candidate. We hope this will increase your chances of becoming part our team and mission to empower people to get more out of life!
Want to learn more about tech at trivago while you’re at it? Check out our video and visit our tech blog!
Thanks to our tech recruiters, Angela Alesci and Janus Kwong, for compiling this article on our tech recruiting process!
