I participated in the initial phone screen and hiring manager interview. Phone screen: 30-minute call to capture basics - motivations about working at Merck KGaA/MilliporeSigma; salary expectations; graduation date/work eligibility; practical areas of interest, etc. Recruiting has an offputting, passive attitude, is uncommunicative, and lacks core people/personality skills. Hiring Manager Interview: 30-45 minute Microsoft Teams call—a conversational discussion with a decent person. Core Point: The executive I worked with was inattentive, cowardly and rude. She refused to follow up on my emails requesting personalized feedback. A simple phone call or tailored email is the bare minimum one could expect since people have invested valuable time to entertain a phone call (especially given the flexibility I generously offered in kind throughout the process). The only "diversity and inclusion" Merck Group appears to acknowledge is hiring the same people: lazy, tenured, status-quo, box-ticking monoethnic clones. The leadership team is more than enough evidence of that. By the way, Compared to JnJ or Novo Nordisk, there's no actual innovation happening here. This has been a genuinely terrible experience. I won't be applying to this company again.