I applied online. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Thermo Fisher Scientific (Florence, SC) in Feb 2024
Interview
It was three rounds. The first round was a quick phone call with the talent manager. The second round was more technical with the onsite manager. Final round was another technical call with the team. Both were about an hour or so long. Communication after each round was slow. Ultimately, I had to reach out after a month to see how the final round was and what the next steps were.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Specific technical chemistry questions about stuff I had on my resume and also some general chemistry questions.
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Thermo Fisher Scientific (Singapore) in Apr 2022
Interview
First round was with HR, typical HR questions. Second round was with China DS team. Asked a few questions from their screen sharing and that was it. Third round was with the hiring manager who seemed like a nice person and we talked about my past experiences. Understood that they were looking to expand the DS team in SG which would require working with counterparts from China, which I did not mind.
The offer was such a huge lowball I felt insulted, almost to the point of feeling that the 'raise' was more like a pittance fee. HR had to cheek to tell me this was for a senior DS role and its in-line with the market. Hello, that number is for a fresh grad, not a senior with 3-5 yoe. Told them I had a competing offer which was 20% higher and told them to meet a figure that was just slightly below that (because I did not really expect them to be able to bridge such a huge gap).
To my surprise, HR got back the next day and met my number. So I upped it and said I would now only consider the offer if its slightly above my competing offer. HR was understandably annoyed but the reasons she gave were so stupid almost to the point of being comedic. She said she stayed up all night to get the latest data and research on whether or not my original figure was feasible. So I followed up with "well then why did you give me such a lowball figure in the first place" and she said its not her fault, these sort of data are not always updated and at that point of time, the offer was inline with market equity. What a ridiculous reason. I was rolling my eyes so hard the whole time during the call. People like her give HR and the company a really bad rep. Anyway I issued the ultimatum of either offering slightly higher than my current competing offer or Im walking. She got back a few hours later and said the team could not meet my expectations and said as per our previous conversation, I would be accepting my other offer, right? I said yes, thank you, bye. And that was it.
To all potential applicants, be very wary of this company in SG. They were benchmarking SG salaries to salaries from other countries (China in this case) which does not make any sense due to many reasons such as different cost of living. They will also not hesitate to lowball you with such a low offer that Hades in hell below could see it. HUGE red flag.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
typical behavioural HR questions like why you want to join, typical ML questions like how to assess a model, how to perform this SQL query given a few tables etc.