MDRC Research Analyst Interview Questions
& Process

The whole thing took about two to three months, which felt like a long time, but HR was super on top of communicating at every point. I applied in late November through an employee referral. I had a first interview scheduled for January and a second round interview at the end of January. I got an offer about a week after the second round. Mine took an extra month cause I had little flexibility and had to push the dates out. The phone interview was pretty standard. Then there was an in person interview that had multiple rounds and a test. I was pretty wiped out by the end, but it wasn't too awful because everyone I talked to was interesting and asked good questions. Maybe one or two people were a bit intense, but it seemed like they were just really interested in what we were talking about. MDRC was one of the most responsive and attentive companies I've interviewed with. HR was really helpful with updates and answering my questions. I was really impressed with how thorough and nice they were through the whole process.

I applied online through the MDRC job portal and was contacted by a research team member for a phone interview within 3 days. The interview focused on my SAS experience, specifically common procedures and data cleaning frequency. It was straightforward with no difficult questions or skills tests. A few days later, I was invited for an in-person interview, meeting with 4 research team members and 1 HR representative. Each interview was simple and direct. Three interviews included a basic SAS skills test where I had to analyze provided SAS code, output, or datasets to find errors or explain their content. Afterward, HR discussed benefits and the timeline for a decision. I mentioned another offer and my deadline. HR was very responsive. They initially estimated a 2-4 week decision period. After two weeks, I followed up and was told the team hadn't decided, so I reiterated my offer deadline. A week later, HR contacted me proactively to say the team was seeking different skills. It was confusing, as I felt highly qualified, especially since the role seemed to be mainly SAS data cleaning rather than advanced analysis. I was surprised by their decision given my qualifications and confident interview performance. However, I appreciated HR's communication regarding my other offer.

Got an email to set up a phone interview, which lasted about 30 minutes. Standard questions were asked, like 'what experience do you have cleaning data?' and 'tell me how you keep organized'. It was all read from a list by someone fairly junior. About 10 days later, HR emailed to set up in-person interviews for the next week. These interviews were about five hours long and involved a lot of different people. The interviewers were nice but asked only open-ended, non-technical questions, which made it hard to know what they were looking for or how I did. I got the vibe they were assessing personality fit more than skills. It's been 1.5 months since I've heard anything, even after reaching out to HR a few weeks ago, so I'm guessing they hired someone else. It would have been nice to get an email letting me know they decided not to move forward, especially after I spent five hours with them.