Applied online.
Got a response within a week inviting me to a phone interview which took an hour. Quite detailed but went ok, going through the job description and the CV. Invited to an on site interview afterwards, which they paid all the expenses for.
The on site interview process was well organised with multiple 1:1 interviewers and 6 hours of meetings.
What had been up to that point a coherent process really did fall apart at this stage, when it became quite clear that none of the interviewers had any real expertise in the skills of the role they were interviewing for - they even stated this was why they were recruiting - to fill the serious gap in the company knowledge and expertise. Expertise in a field must be assessed by other experts, this did not happen.
Syngenta is a great organisation elsewhere but they fell down here. The excessive number of interviewers and rejection of all candidates so far after 5 months indicates that the organisation has lost its nerve, knowing it needs new expertise and thinking but is unwilling to either assess such candidates properly or embrace the cultural change required to avoid repeating previous failures.