Senior+/Staff hiring in Europe: anyone else getting stuck in “passed, but the role changed” limbo?
For context, I have around 10 years of experience in software engineering and I’m currently looking mostly at Senior/Staff-level roles in Germany/Europe. My background is mainly backend/platform/infrastructure, with some engineering leadership and more recently AI adoption/strategy work.
I’ve been interviewing for the last few months and I’m noticing a weird pattern.
I’m not really getting rejected. I just keep ending up in limbo.
The clearest example is one company where I originally interviewed for a Staff/L6 position. I went through the process and was told I had passed, but shortly afterwards they changed their hiring plan and cancelled the role.
A few weeks later they came back to me for another position. I interviewed again, including additional interviews because the role was slightly different. Passed those too.
Then the hiring manager changed his mind about what he wanted to hire.
So now they’re apparently trying to find another position for me somewhere else in the company.
I had another process recently for a staff AI/engineering role where, after speaking with the team, it felt like they hadn’t fully figured out whether they wanted an engineer, an AI strategist, or someone doing organisational transformation.
The interviewers and I basically went into the conversation with different ideas of what the job was.
And I’m currently halfway through another process that seems to be going well, but at this point I’ve learned not to read much into that.
I’m curious if other people interviewing at Senior/Staff+ level in Europe are seeing the same thing.
Are companies starting hiring processes before the headcount/scope/org structure is actually settled?
And for hiring managers here: is this just more common at Staff+ because these roles are less clearly defined and easier to cancel or reshape?
The other thing I’m struggling with is how to treat these situations as a candidate. If a company says “you passed, we like you, we’re trying to find another role for you”, do you actually give that any weight?
The part I’m less sure about is how seriously to take it when a company says “you passed, we like you, we’re trying to find another role for you.”
In your experience, does that usually turn into something, or is it mostly a polite way of keeping a candidate around while plans are still unclear?
Interested to hear if others are having similar experiences, especially in Germany / the EU.