This entire process took three months. It was a massive waste of time and unprofessional practice conducted by the recruiter (in Bulgaria), the hiring manager (Austria/Germany), and their HR (Norway).
The recruiter reached out about the job in mid-March. Right after that, we had a short standard interview, and then I waited a month (with delays) to get an interview with the hiring manager. I got an oral offer after one week (with delays). By now, it's already May, and the recruiter said another HR would reach out soon about the contract and an on-site meeting. HR did not reach out one week later, but the hiring manager scheduled a meeting to discuss the next steps. Then, I was assured that the contract would be ready by May 24th or 27th, about one week after this conversation. On May 31st, the hiring manager said they were finalizing my contract and asked me to wait another week. At this point, they were obviously hiding something, so I called their HR, and she also made excuses for the delay. The next week, the recruiter called and told me that they found another candidate. So this entire process is "one of those recruiting hells" to stall time after they "offered" the position and lied about the progress of giving you a contract.
All the delays refer to late responses they made after their given date for a response. It's very clear that they want to keep you in the process but have little to no interest in making any progress to wrap up the application.
Both the HR and the hiring manager kept referring to the timeframe of "the end of the week," but they almost never responded in time, and when they did, they gave little to no explanation as to why there was a delay. They either have a lot of budgets to waste on recruitment or are horrendously bad at communication.
If they can afford to stall for so long, then they can also reject people and not keep them hanging and lying to them. There were many red flags throughout the process, but giving someone a "fake" offer and lying about the progress of the contract should tell you more than enough about this company.