A month after applying I was contacted for a phone interview. The phone interview was mostly HR, with some questions about background and experience. A few days later I had a follow up interview with a more technical discussion with two team members. A week after this interview I was told they wanted to move forward and were preparing a technical and problem solving skills challenge for me. It took almost two weeks to receive the challenge. The questions asked in the challenge were poorly stated, so merely answering the questions was not satisfactory. They said they would not be moving forward due to a "lack of support and reasoning" in my submitted answers. After explaining that I could provide plenty of reason and graphical, mathematical support for my answers, they allowed me to resubmit, so I did.
A couple weeks later, after they reviewed my submission, I was notified that I would have two more phone interviews. I had one, and in it we never covered anything that wasn't already covered in my previous interview. My submitted solutions to the challenge were not discussed. The next phone interview never came, but I was contacted and told that both of the people who were supposed to have called me enjoyed talking to me. Strange, since I only spoke to one of them. They asked me to come out for an in person interview.
The in-person interview got off to a weird start due to some misinformation that I was given (but cannot repeat, as it apparently violates Glassdoor guidelines), but it overall went well. Three groups interviewed me, each covering different areas and topics. In my first interview, I was asked some questions that seemed very similar to the questions I'd answered in my skills challenge, so I said so. "Oh? What skills challenge? I never heard about that," was the response. No one appeared to be aware that I had done any such challenge. In fact, the challenge that they seemed to place so much importance on was never mentioned by anyone at the company during my visit, including the person who gave it to me.
Despite the job description claiming experiment design would be a task of the research scientist, no one was able to explain to me what this entailed or what kinds of experiments we would be conducting.
I had been asked to prepare a 45 minute presentation before flying out there, which I presented at the end of the interview process. This seemed like overkill to me, as the stated purpose of this presentation was to gauge the interviewee's presentation abilities and skill with handling questions, which can accurately be assessed in about 15 minutes. 45 minutes is needlessly long, especially since I only received two questions during this time. One of the people who probably should have been paying the most attention to my talk was preoccupied with his cell phone most of the time. After my presentation, everything got quiet and instead of the expected, "Alright, thanks for coming out," or, "Thanks for the presentation," or really any verbal acknowledgment whatsoever, it was as if I'd killed the room. I looked down to unplug my computer, and when I looked up everyone had hurried out of the room. I wasn't sure what to do next, so I walked out and was quietly guided to the exit, with the parting words, "Have a nice flight home." Bizarre is an understatement.
A week later I received a two-sentence email saying they weren't going to move forward with me, which, in my opinion, "lacked support and reasoning." There were a lot of questionable things going on with this company during my interview process, but I can't adequately describe them here, as doing so was apparently grounds for the removal of the last review I wrote. In this review I've had to omit a lot of important things that potential employees should know about dealing with RootMetrics during the interview process, but you'll have to just experience them yourself. I get the impression communication at the company is poor, no one knows what anyone else knows, and there's a great deal of carelessness regarding everything but their research.
Everything was mostly positive for me up to and including the data challenge. It was a little fishy and flaky, but nothing that sent up red flags. Almost everything after the data challenge was a sequence of odd events that, instead of seeming like the occasional fluke or communication error, indicated a trend that is part of the company. They're probably fine to work for, but not to interview for.
