Two parts, one online 30 minute conversation and one in person technical interview. Analysis of mouse handling and pipetting techniques, 3 hour total. Talk with multiple people on the team. It was a long process, but you get the opportunity to show all yours skills.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
About previous mouse experience, what type of injections I can perform.
I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at BIOAGE Labs (Richmond, CA) in Oct 2018
Interview
I applied online and the hiring manager gave a phone interview that was very technically oriented. I spent close to an hour describing (in detail) my entire academic experience on a technical level. I even got called back with an additional technical question.
Was brought in to the company in Richmond, CA. Upon entering the company I was greeted by a friendly dog, which was a red flag for me. It is/was a pet friendly company, but this is something I don't appreciate, particularly in an open workplace setting (i.e. you might have a dog at your feet when you are trying to work/eat). I met with the CEO and some other upper management before giving a talk. Not many people attended the talk or seemed interested in the interview as a whole. That was another red flag for such a small company. The initial impression I got was that the company was very academic in how it is run and how they determine which employees they want to hire, which in my experience is not a good thing. i.e. I wasn't convinced they had a clear/focused goal to get to market.
After giving my talk I met with groups of contributors. Again, seemed very ad hoc. Few people had any questions that were beyond company culture or just 'getting to know me'
I finished with a tour of the lab, very disorganized and slapped together needing management, and a final chat with the hiring manager. Hiring manager said to email him with any questions upon departure. I followed up with a thank you email and a question the next day and got no response. Sent a follow up to the follow up and still no response.
All in all it was the most disorganized interview, riddled with bad impressions, that I have ever experienced. Seemed like a good place to work if you want a higher paying second post-doc or a first job to gain 'industry' experience. I don't think I would have accepted an offer if I were given one.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The whole process seemed very disorganized. Most of the questions were regarding how well I was at dealing with work related or employee related issues. It gave me the impression that there is a lot of friction and communication issues at the company. The only technical question that came up more than once was whether I had experience in the field of aging. This confused me given that it seemed very important to them, yet never came up in the phone interview. For the record, the position was very technical in nature and really didn't seem to require someone with a research history in aging to do well.