I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Adyen (Amsterdam) in Nov 2014
Interview
I sent my CV to apply for the role after reading about it on Glassdoor and LinkedIn. Communication with Adyen was always prompt, professional and polite.
The interview was scheduled for an hour, but I ended up spending there three hours without even noticing. I was introduced to seven different people, partly so that they could give feedback about me, but also for me to get as broad and as clear a picture as possible of the company, the workplace, my future colleagues and my future role.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Some general, CV-based questions about myself to break the ice. Then more pragmatic, use-case-based questions like:
- how to deal with their current doc in terms of maintenance, improvement, etc.
- I suggested migrating it to make it more efficient, so we discussed possible alternatives like wiki and DITA XML
- the core of their doc is API doc so we talked about API doc standards, best practices, doc generators like JavaDoc and Swagger.
- Questions on markup like wiki syntax, markdown, rst
- Hands-on examples of how I handled issues/problems/mistakes in the past and how I achieved positive results in my past experience as a tech writer
I applied through a staffing agency. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Adyen (Amsterdam) in Sept 2020
Interview
I was approached by a recruiter from a recruitment agency. A call was scheduled and it was about 1 hour. I was asked to share my entire background and experience. After that, I sent my CV and motivational letter to the recruiter who was very helpful and provided suggestions. Then, the recruiter presented my application to the company. I didn't receive any feedback from Adyen, and only got the rejection update from the recruiter. The reason was that they wanted someone with more API-related experience, while they have already hired two technical writers with no relevant experience. I do appreciate that the recruiter provided more than an automated rejection.