The interview process was unstructured and vague. Throughout the process it seemed that they had no idea what they wanted, and it seemed like they were super keen to hire. They went so far as to ask whether I would be prepared to work 60+ hours a week, and whether I would commute to Palo Alto every day. It was very hard to understand if they had a business plan beyond the current stage. They seemed to focus on what direction you would take to build the business. My sense is that Strategies and Operations roles are only defined once you actually have a business plan and you want to make progress in a specific area., but I got no information as to what that would look like. I am not sure whether there is appreciation for the relative complexity faced in attempting to grow a biotech company.
First call was with their recruiter, which is just a check and see that you actually understand the business concept - Covid testing, using RT-PCR.
Then there was another conversation with hiring manager. There were no real technical challenges, and the scope of work is simplistic. They threw out some sort of excel sheet and I do not use excel as I just use R. I was kind of not expecting this and it was sort of irritating to not have any preparation.
In between, they wanted work product samples, which was involved and there was no warning they wanted this information. It is always unpleasant giving over work samples. They also had you complete a bunch of standardized tests which seemed fairly inappropriate as they were a mixture of psychological and cognitive tests - these sorts of measures are inherently biased and discriminate based on cultural experiences, along with gender, race, and social class.
Finally, there was an on-site though I am uncertain why they had me drive out to East Palo Alto as I did not get to see any elements of the company. The on-site was with three individuals from the management team. Only one of them had a biosciences background, he was a very nice guy.
This company does not seem to want to work with molecular biologists. They were apparently pleasant during the interview and then claimed I lacked clarity and synthesis. Though I am uncertain what this means since they did not seem to have any position specific questions! The one question that they seemed to want me to answer was one that no decent professional would attempt to answer without a proper review of the market and their technology (what direction would you take the company?) They provided no insights into their growth projections which made it impossible to know what type of strategic growth approach one might take. They also did not seem to want to understand the complexity of biological testing and that RT-PCR is the most simple molecular technique one does in the lab. It has limited bandwidth for diagnostics, and other tests are more advantageous or amenable to use.
They did not seem interested in a specific skill set. They did not like the fact that I gave too much detail when explaining concepts… I get the feeling they are another tech company that believes you can be in the biotech space without any molecular biologists! If you basically speak in short and snappy business speak, and minimize the complexity of biological diagnostics then I imagine they will snap you up. If you suggest or imply that the problem is more complicated than they might believe then it will be viewed as proof you are basically incompetent or inept.
