The hiring process had 3 parts. The first was a meeting in a coffee shop close to their office in Sydney. This was more like a friendly chat, and the head of one of the Idea Science groups explained what the company did, how it was structured, and what the role was. I talked about what I'd done before and what I was looking for. The second part was a presentation where I was asked to talk about something I'd worked on before, what the challenges had been and how we'd met them. It was interesting because I think my presentation was pretty short but with all the questions and discussion we ended up taking up a full hour. The third part was a follow up meeting with 2 people. They asked more questions about how I'd approach different problems, how I'd work within the team, and what I wanted to be doing. Overall it seemed like a very organised process and different from what I'd experienced before. The presentation part challenged me a bit but I think that was intentional.

I hadn't had an interview process like this before. The 1st step was to have a chat over coffee with the head of one of the groups - that was informal, with the person providing background about the company, how it started, the growth, the focus areas, and the needs of the role. I was asked to describe myself, what I was good at, what I had achieved, what I was proud about, what sort of place I wanted to work for. There was also some questions about my CV - including why I had left a previous job in less than 6 months. At the end I was asked if I would participate in a "presentation" style interview. For the presentation interview I was asked to prepare a 5-10 min presentation on something that I had been involved in, and talk about what it was, why, some challenges & how we had solved them, and a bit of background. The actual presentation had 4 people in it and took a lot longer as they asked a lot of questions. The best thing about this was that I felt that I really got to know the type of people I would be working with, and it gave me a lot of confidence that I would like to work here.