I applied for this position after seeing the offer on my business school website. I received an e-mail a week later from the J&J HR department telling me they were interested in my application and that I could go on to the next step : the online personnality and numerical ability tests.
I received the passwords for these tests the following week.
The personnality test takes about 30 minutes to complete. From what I remember, you were given series of 6 situations or self-descriptions and I had to tell which ones were the most relevant in my case. It pretty much reminded me of the Myer's Briggs test.
As for the 30-minute numerical ability test, you can practice it online just before taking it. I am not a genius in maths, but with a little practice it went just fine.
A week after taking the 2nd test, I was contacted by the same person from the HR department. She told me by e-mail that I was invited to an assessment centre a couple of weeks later. As the office isn't located in central London, details were given to help us organize our trip (travel expenses are to be reimbursed, hotel I don't know yet).
We were 6 candidates taking part in the morning session, with 6 other candidates in the afternoon session. The atmosphere was good and the people there made us feel welcomed from the start.
At first, the HR manager and a brand manager gave us a detailed presentation of J&J and the position.
Then we moved on to a group activity. We had to organize a charity event together in 30-45 minutes after reading an information booklet for 15 minutes. There were about 8 people observing us (HR people + brand managers).
After a short break, we prepared an individual case study for 1 hour. The case was about the launch of North African wines in the UK and you had to tell how you would to it (price, promotion, P&L...).
After lunch we had the 1:1 interviews with brand managers which started with the presentation of the case, a short Q&A session about the case and then a classic interview. The brand managers were really friendly and made us feel at ease. The interview part was really classic : they obviously had a formal list of questions, a bit like at P&G.
J&J was supposed to give us feedback within a week, but I received mine 12 days after the assessment center. I appreciated the fact that they sent me a detailed e-mail with both positive and negative aspects of my application, since most companies just send the same old message to everyone.
During the group activity and the interview, I showed that I liked to take the lead and the people at J&J felt that I wouldn't be comfortable in a support role. Then, for the individual case, I did not manage my time well at all and therefore did not answer all questions effectively (but that was the case of the other candidated in my session). If I could do it again, I would have worked much faster (1 hour passes really fast), instead of taking my time at the beginning to process the information, and I would have used the writing board right away to make my presentation more convincing.