First round beings with HR phone screen to ensure interview process is mutually beneficial and no red flags. Second round entails 45 minute technical phone interview with questions regarding research experience as well as soft skills. Final round includes onsite seminar 45 minute talk and 15 minute Q&A followed by ~8 1x1 in-person interviews.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Q: What experience do you have collaborating with a multi-disciplinary team?
I applied online. The process took 8 weeks. I interviewed at GSK (Stevenage, England) in Dec 2016
Interview
context: I am trying to get an industry research job directly after graduating with a PhD in bioinformatics.
Applied to job ad on website. Phone interview 2 weeks later. Then I got invited for a 5 hour in person interview in Stevenage, UK. The company paid for travel expenses and organized a driver to pick me up at LHR airport. The inteview consisted of 4 30 minutes individual interviews ( hiring manager and one other group leader/director, 1 manager of communication between departments, 1 prospective colleague). Lunch with 2 prospective colleagues at their cafeteria. 45 minutes presentation to about 10 people about my PhD research and finally 1 hour panel (4 people, all of them scientists) interview with a personality/behavioural part and a technical part.
* There was some last-minute planning. I did not get an agenda in advance and my talk was changed from 45 minutes plus time for questions to 45 minutes including numerous questions on the evening before the interview.
* People were friendly and the atmosphere was quite relaxed for an interview. Dresscode seems to be casual to smart casual. I (and the driver) were the only people in a full suit.
* The research campus in Stevenage is huge and contains thousands of researchers. They have huge open offices and often little knowledge about what their colleagues are working on.
* Everyone asked about motivation to do industry research/choosing GSK. They expected detailed answers.
* In each part of the interview it was expected that I ask numerous questions about the job.
* They told me that that will interview two other candidates and decide for one of us.
Interview questions [4]
Question 1
Why do you want to work in the pharmaceutical Industry/For GlaxoSmithKline (by many people, in many versions)? What is your educational background? What are your career plans, would you like to manage people or projects? What are your strengths and weaknesses? What do you like/not like about your current job? How do you feel about not being able to continue a project? How far is your progress in writing your thesis? Are you willing to relocate? How much do you know about pharmaceutical research/biology. Do you have wetlab experience? Which part of your computational experience will be the most useful for GSK?
Describe your programming experience? What is your favourite R package? What is C++ stxxl? What use does C++ boost have for computational biology? Are you interested in implementing/standardising pipelines?
What types of -omics data have you worked on? Given the interest to work in Pharma, why did you not try to work on some human/medical data during your PhD? What was the last computational biology paper that you liked? Could you explain the work of the ENCODE project? How can GWAS be used to infer causality? How to design a best practice system for NGS data analysis? Given FASTQ files produced by a collaborator, how can you get differentially expressed genes? What strategies can be used to infer causality between differentially methylated regions and differentially expressed transcripts without the need for hundreds of samples?
Tell me about a time when: you had a conflict with a colleague, took initiative to change something, did something that didn't work, used teamwork, learned something new, solved a problem, coped with a sudden change.
I applied online. The process took 3 days. I interviewed at GSK
Interview
The interview was good, interviewers were friendly and patient to listen to what I say. The questions where mostly related to my earlier experience, and projects I worked on. Followed by a few of the HR type questions like where do I see myself in next 10 years, why did i chose GSK over other, etc. Overall it was a good experience
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Where would I invest if I had 1 million dollars to invest?