I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Science and Technology Facilities Council (Didcot, England) in Jan 2018
Interview
Hiring process was relatively easy. I applied online, received a competency-based telephone call shortly after. The face-to-face interview was a group panel talking about my CV and an on-the-spot exercise/test.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Based on the 6 tables given, recreate a more efficient SQL relation database.
I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Science and Technology Facilities Council (Harwell, South East England, England) in Apr 2016
Interview
Assessment centre style process, wasn't really sure where to go other than the STFC campus but found what seemed like reception who pointed me in the right direction. Quite well organised for the most part and everyone was very friendly, lots of tours although we saw the ISIS target stations about 3 times over which seemed unnecessary and some of the people showing us round seemed to have had us dumped on them unexpectedly. Included some info about the graduate programme, individual interviews; one personality-based following up on the online tests they have you complete beforehand and one technical which was ok, problem being that a lot of the questions were very technical and related to areas I had no knowledge of, being a physics student with some programming experience rather than a computer science student. Arguably that's my fault for applying to a role I wasn't qualified for but they were willing to give me an interview on the basis of my application which was honest about my level of programming knowledge and the programming questions which were relevant to what I had claimed to be capable of went well. Good experience though, got a free lunch and a good impression from the campus and everyone that worked there. If they had any graduate jobs going this year that I was interested in I would definitely apply again as I think it would be a good place to work. They covered travel costs as well which is a big plus, lots of companies don't and I've spent hundreds of pounds on trains travelling to London and back for other interviews. They even cover overnight stay in a local travelodge/premier inn type thing if you want to do that, I didn't bother though just got a really early train for the 9am start.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Some stuff about object-oriented programming, some other stuff I was able to do quite well, can't remember really it was a while ago. It was "programming" by writing on a sheet of paper which is quite weird. Asked me about debugging as well, I just said I generally run it and see if it breaks.
Also a group activity involving packing different size and shape blocks into "crates" that you needed to cut out of cardboard to put in a mock aircraft hold and try and optimise the route the aircraft took to drop them in the best order to use the least fuel. No real mathematical way to do this, it was just obvious by eye.