I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at BASF (Bologna) in Jan 2014
Interview
The process was composed of two steps: a phone call and the assessment day. It was very fast and the corporate HR staff was very professional (i.e. there's a European call center that answers in your language whatever it is) but impersonal (i.e. no way to obtain a personal feedback nor the contacts of the person with whom you talked).
The 1 hr phone call tests your language skills and assesses the basic "motivation" and competency questions.
The assessment day was held in the plant where the position was to be setted and it involved 8 candidates. It encompassed a short presentation of the company, of the Italian division and of the plant itself, then a psychometric test, a short personal presentation, a whole team "case study" (not technical, more say to test your teamwork attitude and your ability to deal with problems without any optimal solution) and a technical case study too, but in smaller teams.
Eventually, each candidate went through an individual 1hr technical interview and an individual 1hr "competency based" interview with an HR consultant not being part of the company.
The assessment day was a bit strange, because the technical engineers that were interviewing us didn't know much about the position (and benefits) and the HR consultants, if possible, knew even less about that since they were not from the company.
Therefore it was not clear which abilities were most valuable (more project mgmt, as the name of the position suggests? more technical?) and there was no clear career path.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
You have a water stream containing a very precious metal and a very dangerous ore: how do you recover metal and minimize ore contact/diffusion?
You distillate batchwise some wine in your garage to obtain some 45° spirit. Unfortunatelly, this stinks, how do you prevent the smell? (Without adding flavours and without complicate machinery that you can't afford nor fit in your garage)
Colloquio di gruppo.
Interessante, ma un po' complesso. Si richiede un'ottima preparazione a livello universitario e ottime skills di ragionamento, problem solving, lavoro di squadra. Testata la lingue inglese, la capacità logico-deduttiva, la conoscenza teorica di materie di indirizzo (ing. chimica)
Esercizi volti a valutare le skills dei candidati. Generalmente condotti in team di 15 persone che devono collaborare per risolvere un problema. Ti osservano molto durante questi step, mettendo spesso ansia sui candidati e appuntando (o facendo finta) cose su quaderni mentre ti osservano interagire con gli altri
la mattina assesment di gruppo con le risorse umane e altri candidati + colloquio tecnico con i reponsabili del teamd i project engineering e project management della durata di un'ora circa