I was contacted on LinkedIn by someone from a recruitment agency for an Acquisition Specialist role at Compari.ro (the local business of the Heureka Group in Romania) at the beginning of April, and I had an initial interview with a recruiter from this company.
A week later, I received positive feedback and I had the first online interview with a recruiter and with a ops. manager from Heureka. After this interview I had to do a home assignment, which was basically a presentation of the advantages of their platform and I had to present it online in the second round.
After this round it took almost 2 weeks of deliberations until I received an offer from their side which turned out to be very disappointing. Please understand that I stated my salary expectations from the start and they acknowledged it, and we continued the recruitment process, just to find out that during the whole rounds that took almost 2 months, their budget was 25% less than I actually expressed.
Since they saw me as a valuable candidate and as an actual member of their team, in a very friendly manner they said that my decision of refusing their offer was a bit unexpected and as a last resort they set up a face-to-face meeting with another manager in Bucharest to essentially make me change my mind to join their company and also try to negotiate the salary.
The meeting was a total failure since this manager had nothing relevant to say, except that he only wanted to meet every candidate and to see if there will be any “chemistry” between us, and took notes about my salary expectations, which he already had or should’ve had.
With over 10 years in Sales and 5 years in Business Development, all I got from them, in what they actually called it as an “exceptional offer” was €1175 net + some lousy benefits to make it more attractive.
In the end the entire recruitment process took almost two months, and I wasted a lot of time and energy to finally get rejected because they cannot meet the salary that I stated from the start.
Disappointingly, the same position that I was sourced for has been posted on LinkedIn, suggesting that Heureka may struggle to find suitable candidates due to unrealistic expectations and lack of transparency.
Overall, my experience with Heureka was disappointing and a total waste of time.
