Citi Interview Questions
& Process

This was by far the worst interview experience I have ever had, lasting about 7 months from start to withdrawal, with communication delays of weeks or even months. The interview process itself took about 2 months to complete, followed by several more weeks waiting for an offer. A counteroffer negotiation took 3 months with very poor communication, ultimately resulting in a minimal base salary increase. The process stalled further due to a required Dutch criminal screening document, which Citi refused to sponsor, making it effectively impossible to obtain. This led me to withdraw my application. Subsequently, I was contacted about another role, and despite expressing concerns about the previous experience, I received no reply to my follow-up email after 4 weeks.

I applied online with my CV and cover letter, then I did a Plum assessment. Later, I got invited for interviews. There were two 30-minute interviews on the same day. The first was technical, so I made sure to understand what the department does. The interviewer was a bit hard to connect with and kept telling me not to be nervous, which felt a bit condescending. The second interview was behavioral. The interviewer was nice and polite, but it felt very structured, like they were just reading from a list and moving on quickly.

First, a recruiter emailed me to check my background and set up the initial chat. The first interview lasted 30 minutes with two team members, focusing on my experience and asking some basic technical questions about Python and Git. Then, I had a second interview scheduled for 30 minutes with the Hiring Manager and a senior team member, but it ended up being an hour long, and another senior team member joined. This round dove deeper into my experience and personal projects, especially those relevant to what the team does. I was hit with foundational technical questions covering OOP, deployment pipelines, and more Python. I also got a better feel for the team's role and how my skills could fit in. The whole thing wrapped up in 3 weeks.

I was contacted by the recruiter via email to schedule an interview. I had 3 interviews planned over 2 days. Unfortunately, my first scheduled interviewer didn't show up. I reached out to the recruiter about this but got no response. My second and third interviews went as expected and were pretty standard. Interestingly, both interviewers asked what I had been told about the role, which made me think there might have been a breakdown in communication or a step missed in the process. I emailed the recruiter again to try and reschedule the missed interview and to follow up on my previous messages, but still, I received no reply. The people I did manage to speak with were great, and I enjoyed our conversations. However, the recruiter's lack of response was unprofessional. While I know recruiters sometimes ghost candidates, failing to acknowledge or respond when interviews are already scheduled is unprofessional.