I applied online for a Policy Analyst position with World Policy Analysis Center. I received an email about a month later to schedule a phone or in-person email (nice to have the choice). I elected for an in-person and met with 3 team members at once. The interview was extremely dry, and all three seemed very intent on being as formal and serious as possible, even much more so than other interviews I've had in fields like management consulting. Most of the questions were about my experience with both qualitative and quantitative research, my experience using different statistical packages, my comfortability with writing and policy analysis etc., as well as questions about my language expertise. Some of the questions did not make sense to me, and they didn't seem to want to explain when I asked, but i believe some of them lacked experience interviewing.
After a few issues with communication, which they were very patient over, they sent me a timed assignment to complete at home. The work was fair and probably very similar to the job itself. I felt that I had done a decent if imperfect job, but I never received any feedback. I continued to contact the office for updates weekly, but I received a rejection email 2 months after the process began. As I usually do, I emailed back just to ask why I had been passed over, simply to help me in my job search, but they never responded (it's usually 50:50 anyway). While the process was extremely long and lacked transparency, that is probably to be expected at a large university, and the coordinator was always good at getting back to my calls and emails.
