Citi HR called to let me know that they were proceeding with my application. After that, I was contacted by the scheduling team for the first, second, and third rounds of interviews. It's critical to realize that the individual who called me to set up the interviews knew nothing other than scheduling. And, There won't be enough avenues for you to contact staff if you have any query. So, it is a one way traffic. After several days have passed and the three rounds have been completed, HR has just vanished and is no longer reachable. Also there is no change of status in https://citi.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/ . The "Business Review" status is still shown, indicating that there have been no interview failures or rejections yet. This makes it quite evident that they had a pre-selected candidate and that the hiring process was a fake show. The HR is thoroughly corrupt and shameless. So, your talents and abilities will not be the deciding factor in your selection if you are participating in the Citi recruitment process.

Let me give a bit of background about me. I have been in tech for about 23-24 years. During that time, I have lived and worked in 7 countries. I have worked at FAANG-level companies such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, as well as mid-sized companies like Booking.com and Deliveroo, in addition to several startups. I have also had offers from other FAANG companies and many startups across different markets. I have worked as both an individual contributor and in leadership and management roles, so I have seen a wide range of interview processes over the years. Compared to everywhere else I have interviewed, this was by far the worst interview experience I have ever had. Why? First, the recruiter communication was extremely poor. I understand that banks are not known for speed or efficiency, but this was not a matter of waiting days or even weeks. We are talking about months. To give a concrete example, from the moment I started the process to the moment I withdrew, and that was still at least 2-3 months before I would even have been able to start, the whole thing had already dragged on for about 7 months. For comparison, my process with Google, which is widely known to be slow, took about 4 months. During those 4 months, communication with recruiters rarely took more than 2-3 days. At Citi, it was completely normal to finish an interview stage and then hear absolutely nothing for 3 weeks. Even when I followed up, it often felt like my emails disappeared into a black hole. The interview process started around late June or July 2025, and it took roughly 2 months just to complete the actual interviews. The tech stack and architecture felt somewhat outdated for my taste, but given that it is a financial institution, that was not especially surprising. After the interviews were completed, I then waited several more weeks for the offer. I made a counteroffer asking for an increase in base salary and a sign-on bonus to offset a clawback clause in my previous employer’s contract. This was not an unreasonable ask at all, and it was still well within Citi’s budget, especially compared to my previous compensation at Google, which I was already willing to compromise on. How long did it take them to respond to that? About 3 months. Those 3 months were also filled with extremely poor communication. I would send emails asking for updates and hear nothing for weeks. I had to keep sending reminders with no idea whether the process had stalled, whether they had changed their mind, or whether anyone was even paying attention. After those 3 months, they came back, declined the sign-on bonus, and increased the base by only 10K. So after 3 months of internal meetings, budget discussions, and leadership coordination, the outcome was 10K. They were willing to risk losing a candidate for an SVP role over around 40K in sign-on compensation, despite the fact that the internal cost of repeating the process, recruiter time, coordinator time, MD/VP/Director/Architect interview hours, reopening the req, and restarting hiring operations, would likely land in the same range anyway. And that does not even include 6+ months of delay in execution for a leadership role, the operational exposure that comes with leaving such a position unfilled, or the possibility that the next candidate could ask for even more. Trying to save 40K while risking losses many times greater than that says a great deal about the decision-making and leadership culture. At that point, I asked what the next steps would be. There were still many more documents to complete, which looked like they would add another 2-3 months of waiting. But the issue that finally pushed this beyond reason was the requirement for a Dutch criminal screening document because I had lived in the Netherlands about 6 years ago. The problem was simple: 1. They expected me to handle the entire process by myself, with no support at all. 2. When I researched it, the process was clearly described as taking months, and there was no guarantee I could even obtain it since I am not a Dutch citizen and no longer live there. 3. To even begin that process, the employer requesting the document needs to sponsor it, since personal applications are not accepted, and Citi refused to do that. In other words, they required a document that they would not help facilitate, even though their own involvement was necessary to make it possible. That made the request effectively impossible. So I withdrew my application and sent detailed feedback to HR, recruitment, and leadership. I never received a single real response. No one called. No one tried to discuss it. No one apologized. The only thing I received was the automated system message confirming that my application had been withdrawn. And to be clear, I live in the UK. So the usual excuse people make about companies being afraid of legal exposure if they speak candidly does not really hold much weight here. The bar for that is very different from the US. What made this even worse is what happened later. A few months afterward, I was contacted by another Citi recruiter regarding another role: Director of Innovation Lab & AI Engineering. This was clearly a senior and important leadership role. I replied within about 40 minutes, explaining that I had recently declined an offer because of my previous experience, but that I might still consider another opportunity if those issues would not happen again. That email was sent on March 4. Today is April 1, and I still have not received any reply at all. No acknowledgment, no clarification, no apology, no thank you for your response. Nothing. For me, Citi is a major red-flag organization and not somewhere I would seriously consider again.