Element Biosciences Interview Questions
& Process

So I had a round with the hiring manager first, then the recruiter, then a panel interview which included a 30-minute presentation and 5 other interviews. They mentioned offers would be around January 13th. After the last interview, I waited six weeks with mostly reactive communication and no transparency. I ended up declining to move forward on January 31st. They then requested another interview two weeks out. They gave me a timeframe for this, blew past it without saying anything, and weren't forthcoming. It was easily the worst experience I've had with a company, showing incompetence and disorganization. I wanted the job, but this company showed me they're a mess.

We started with a 30min HR phone screen, followed by a 30min 1:1 Zoom call with the hiring manager. Then there was a panel presentation and individual Zoom calls with 5 key stakeholders, each lasting 30min. It was a pretty thorough process with mostly Q&A and conversational interviews, no behavioral ones though.

It began with a pleasant HR representative. She asked me for my availability for a subsequent phone interview, which I provided. After two days of silence, I noticed an email from someone else confirming an interview at a time I hadn't offered, and it was a Zoom call, not a phone call. I had to reschedule last minute because I had another interview scheduled concurrently. The rescheduling was quick, as the hiring manager was also on the email. The Zoom interview with the hiring manager was straightforward; she didn't pose difficult questions. Given my five years of direct experience, I felt quite confident. She seemed eager to finish the conversation, leading me to believe I probably didn't get the job, though I'm unsure of what went wrong or how I could have improved. Two days later, I got the rejection notice.

The hiring manager reached out via email and asked some initial technical questions to check my knowledge. After that, there was a zoom screen with more technical questions. Then, I had a panel interview via zoom where I had to give a presentation followed by a Q&A session. Finally, I did 1-on-1 interviews with the panel members. It was a really tough interview process. Even though I didn't get the job because my technical skills weren't what they were looking for, I did get feedback from the hiring manager, which was good.