Online assessment: The platform was Testlify. It contained a mixture of typical aptitude tests, for example non-verbal reasoning (patterns to recognise), verbal reasoning (cause and effect relations), and some calculation questions (like to find the weekday of a date in year XX). The last part is especially heavy for people who did not yet have exposure with drug development or the actual terminology. For me it was a case study on an immunological sickness, with about 15 exhibit documents provided. The candidate must answer single- and multiple-choice questions in only 25 minutes, by putting together the informations from disease biology, target biology, actual treatment situation, preclinical animal data, clinical study design, PK/PD results in early trials, safety and efficacy numbers, and FDA guidelines. The exhibits are supposed to mirror the materials which a Consultant analyse in the daily business.
First round interview: Quite standard, more or less only „walk me through your CV and PhD.“
Assessment day interviews: Two calls of 40 minutes, with a mixture of motivation questions and also case study tasks. Some questions felt a bit arbitrary, sometimes with quick head calculation, and others asking for understanding of clinical development.
Assessment day presentation: The topic was given already some days before. The presentation and the interviews can come in any order. My task was if I agree or not with a recent FDA refusal decision, and I had to look very critical at the asset’s data. There were minimum 5 people in the call, but it did not result in any real discussion, which I found a bit strange.
After the assessment day, I got the offer quite fast.