Key takeaways
Adyen, the Amsterdam-founded payments company, publishes its hiring process in detail. Six stages, a hiring philosophy built on eight written principles, and a last round that puts every candidate in front of a senior executive from its Management Board or Global Leadership team. Its recruiters have also written down, by name, what they want to hear. The short version is that Adyen tests whether you know the company and whether you can tell specific, honest stories about your own work. Both are things you can prepare for.
What are the stages of the Adyen interview process?
Adyen's How we hire page names six stages and says they "apply across all teams and regions," while warning that the order may vary slightly.
Application review. Adyen commits to being in touch within five business days of receiving your application. That gives you a useful marker. If a week passes in silence, a polite check-in is reasonable.
Recruiter screen. A recruiter reaches out to learn about you and the experience relevant to the role. Treat it as the first real interview. Separately, Adyen's recruitment team tells candidates to use "recruiter prep calls" to ask what to expect, so the recruiter is also your best source on the rounds that follow.
Team interview. You meet someone from the hiring team for an in-depth conversation about the role, your experience, and how you work.
Skills assessment. Depending on the role, Adyen asks for "either a technical skills test or a case study presentation." More on this below.
Leadership interview. You meet a leader from the team you're joining and discuss your motivation for joining Adyen.
Final interview. Per Adyen, your final interview "will be with a senior executive from our Management Board or Global Leadership team."
One variation is worth knowing in advance. In a September 2025 post from its Global Recruitment team, Adyen notes that "for some roles, the order of step three and five will be reversed," meaning the leadership conversation can come before the team interview. Ask your recruiter which order you're on, since it changes who you need your motivation story ready for first.
What is the Adyen Formula, and why does it come up in every round?
Adyen says its hiring process is "rooted in the Adyen Formula," and the Formula page lists the eight principles that guide how the company works. A few of them read like interview prompts already. "We launch fast and iterate." "Winning is more important than ego." "We don't hide behind email," with the rest of the line being that Adyen staff pick up the phone instead. "We talk straight without being rude."
Plenty of companies publish values. What makes Adyen's worth taking seriously is that its recruiters have said what they want candidates to do with them. The Global Recruitment team writes that it wants "engagement with the Formula past pure memorization," and that candidates should find connections with their past experiences. A São Paulo-based recruitment partner quoted in the same post encourages candidates to ask interviewers about the Formula from their own standpoint, adding that "everyone will be 100% glad to talk about it."
Read that as a warning against reciting the list. Pick the principles that genuinely describe how you work, and find the moments in your career that prove it. A time you delivered unwelcome news to a senior colleague, clearly and without heat, says more about talking straight without being rude than any paraphrase of the line. And if a principle sits badly with how you like to work, the interview process is a good time to find that out.
What happens in the Adyen skills assessment?
Adyen publishes little about the format beyond the split, which makes sense for a company whose careers site spans commercial, tech, product, and operational roles. Depending on the role, you get either a technical skills test or a case study you present, and your recruiter can tell you which.
What Adyen does say is how it judges the result. Deborah Desouza, an Amsterdam-based recruiting lead quoted in the recruitment team's post, says that "we really want to see how you think on your feet, and preparation goes a long way." She adds that the assessment simulates "a real-world scenario with real-world problems," and that candidates should articulate how they'd think through the solutions.
Read those two lines together and the instruction is to narrate. A correct answer delivered in silence gives the interviewer very little to score. A slightly rougher answer where you state your assumptions, explain the tradeoff you're making, and say what you'd check next shows them the thinking they asked to see. For a case presentation, that means rehearsing the delivery as well as building the slides. For a technical test, it means practicing talking while you work, which feels unnatural until you've done it a few times. Our take-home assignment guide covers how to scope and present work like this.
Who do you meet in the Adyen final interview?
Every candidate's last round is with a senior executive from the Management Board or Global Leadership team, according to Adyen's own hiring page. For a company whose about page lists 4000+ employees and 115+ nationalities, putting a senior leader in front of each hire is a real cost. Adyen doesn't publish what that round assesses, so ask your recruiter.
If you're interviewing for a leadership position, Adyen has said what it wants to learn across the process. Matt Rum, a San Francisco-based executive and leadership recruiter, says the team wants to explore "how you think, how you've grown, and how you've guided others through complexity." Whatever your level, the leadership interview before this round is explicitly about your motivation for joining Adyen, so know why you want Adyen in particular.
How long does the Adyen interview process take?
Adyen's FAQ says the process takes "a little over a month" on average and varies by role. If you have a constraint, such as a competing offer or a notice period, the same page asks you to tell your recruiter so they can try to accommodate it.
A few other practical details from that FAQ are worth knowing. Interviews happen by phone, via Zoom, and in person. There is no dress code. If you're declined for a role, there is a 30-day waiting period before you can reapply for that same position, and Adyen's applicant tracking system enforces it. And to help candidates spot impersonators, Adyen states that legitimate messages come only from addresses ending in @adyen.com and that it never asks for payment or financial information.
Where engineering-focused guides fall short
The prep-site guide we read before writing this one is built for engineers, around Java coding rounds and system design, with the Formula as one round among five or six. Adyen's own page puts it differently. The company says it expects candidates to have "a solid understanding of our business, our products, and the Adyen Formula," on top of the technical or role-specific requirements.
A candidate who has drilled algorithms but can't explain what Adyen sells, who its customers are, or which principle a past project illustrates is underprepared by Adyen's own published standard. The recruitment team even names the reading list. It points candidates to the job description, the Formula, customer case studies, and the company's latest earnings report.
How to prepare for an Adyen interview
- Read Adyen's latest earnings report and two customer case studies before the recruiter screen. Be ready to say in two sentences what Adyen does and why that business interests you.
- Read the Formula page and pick the principles that honestly describe how you work, with a real example behind each. Use the STAR method, which Adyen's recruitment team recommends by name, to keep each one tight.
- Book the recruiter prep call and ask three things. Which order your stages run in, what format your skills assessment takes, and who you'll meet in the final round.
- Rehearse your skills assessment out loud, narrating your reasoning as you go. Adyen says it wants to see how you think on your feet, and that only shows if you speak while you think.
- Practice your stories out loud under time pressure before the team interview. Ashley Gomez, a Singapore-based Senior Recruitment Business Partner at Adyen, tells candidates to "be honest, lead with specifics, and be a storyteller," and the gap between knowing your answer and delivering it under pressure is where most specifics get lost. A voice mock interview is a quick way to hear whether yours survive.
- Prepare real questions for each interviewer, including one about how they apply the Formula day to day. Our list of questions to ask at the end of an interview is a starting point.
The pattern worth taking away
Adyen has written down what it wants from candidates in plain terms. Know the business. Connect its principles to things you've actually done. Show your thinking in the skills assessment. Be ready to talk about who you are with a senior executive. None of that rewards cramming the night before, and all of it rewards a candidate who did the reading and practiced telling their own stories out loud.
The companies that publish their process this openly are telling you the test in advance. The candidates who win are the ones who take them at their word.