Part 1

Screening

So your resume made it through and we want to talk to you. The next step, for us, is a phone screen and a coding test.

At this point, we're generally rooting for each of the candidates. We've selected those that we think are most promising and hope they'll fulfill our expectations. We want the search to finish (almost) as much as they do. So if a candidate asks questions about how they can best prepare for the different segments, we’re generally happy to help, if the request is courteous and reasonable.

The phone screen is a way to get to know the candidate, get a feel for their accomplishments and give them a chance to know what the job is about. Questions vary from from being very technical to being pretty fluffy (what is your background, what are you looking for). Doing some research on the opportunity is important, see what the group is about, try to read some of the papers, ask intelligent questions about the system. Not having done that research isn't going to sink an otherwise good candidate, but it's definitely a bad sign.

######Perspective from u/apfejes: I’ve done a ton of phone screens, and I can cheerfully say that the best candidates are the ones that are truly interested in the job. That usually means they have questions about the environment, co-workers, team strategies, etc. They are interviewing the interviewer as much as the interviewer is interviewing them. The worst phone conversations are the ones where the applicant just passively listens and doesn’t engage at all. While you don’t have to be a people-person, you do need to genuinely be interested in the job to get past a phone screen.

Coding tests

Coding tests come in many varieties and are one of the best predictors of technical ability. They’re also a way to get to know the candidates better. We check if the code is readable and well commented, if it focuses on optimization or modularization, what kind of error checking is in place. The benefits of these tests is that they are much more objective than others (does the code work, is it readable, etc.) and directly related to the tasks at hand. It’s not perfect, someone might have done it before and another one might just have a brain cramp, but in general they are very informative.

######Perspective from u/fpepin:

The coding test we have is a take-home assignment that should take 2-3 hours to complete. The candidate selects a time, we email everything and expect results 3 hours later. It's moderately challenging, meant to make sure that candidates have the basic coding skills and ability to manipulate probabilities.

We'll generally make a decision within a few days after each aspect. Often we’ll know right away, but we still sleep on it before making it official. Other times, we're just busy or unsure. The usual suggestion is ask when to expect an answer, wait a week after that and ask about it.

######Perspective from u/apfejes:

As a candidate, code tests can be pretty intense. I’ve been asked to do code tests that are expected to take several days, which is a massive time commitment for a job you haven’t even interviewed for. Thus, you should make sure you’re very serious about the job before you undertake a code test. Once you do commit, make sure you go through everything you need to know about the test: Understand what the employer defines as “success”, and what the expectations are. On my last code test, I took the time to invent a completely new way of partitioning FACS data, to satisfy the data provided. It turned out they only wanted me to throw the data against a handful of generic machine learning algorithms, and weren’t impressed with what I’d done. Ooops.

On Site Interview

On site interviews are a candidate’s moment to shine. The company obviously believes in you enough to bring you in, and to put you in front of the people whose time costs the company money. At this point, you’re probably one of a small number of candidates for the position, and you have only one job: show you’re the best.

That often breaks down into a small number of criteria, summed up as “fit”. If you haven’t done a code test, or had technical discussions, that will probably take place at the same time. (Entire books have been written on doing on-site interviews, which may be worth reading, if you’re early in your career.) Either way, consider that most of your interview time will be spread among people with whom you’ll be working - and in some environments, you need to have unanimous approval from each of them.

Perspective from u/fpepin:

For remote candidates, we often have a short (2-3 hours) video interview first before going through the expense of flying a candidate in.

The interview is generally a full-day event, with a presentation at the beginning if the position expects significant research/industry experience. It's a good way to see how a candidate can present their expertise and how they can deal with questions about it. It's a good idea to ask about the audience, because it's not always easy to guess (most aren't in bioinformatics in our case).

The interviews tend to be 30-45 min each with a lunch in between to let the candidate ask more questions about the job/company/culture, etc. Generally, we'll ask each interviewer to focus on a single aspect and we try to ask the same questions to everyone so we can have a point of comparison.

During the interview, itself, each person will ask questions unique to their field. Some will ask things the candidate would’ve never heard of, or to discuss things that are way outside their experience. That’s all part of the test - they want to know how the candidate would handle working in a challenging environment, including how they handle problems for which they aren’t at all prepared. The best thing to do is for someone to take it in stride, and do their best.

######Perspective from u/apfejes:

Interviews are a bit like speed dating - Your task is to make the best impression you can to everyone you meet. Because interviews are so short, it is often easy to slip up and rub someone the wrong way. I’ve interviewed for a position in which they were proud to brag that they’d cancelled an offer to a C-level position applicant because they’d made some comment about office windows that rubbed a few junior people the wrong way.

At the end of the day, every interviewer you’ve met with is going to have to ask themselves “Do I want to work with this person every week day for the next 5 years?” - And the successful candidate will basically need a strong yes from each interviewer. Usually, the interviewer’s feedback will be solicited (which might take a few days to gather and process if there were more than one or two), and a decision is made based on that information. If they’re interviewing a lot of people (because they’re growing rapidly), the more key positions will be higher priority, so be prepared to be patient.