I was contacted directly by the HM with no recruiter in the mix, slightly refreshing but perhaps also reflecting the tiny nature of the core of the company and this particular team. He set up a one-on-one interview in which he asked about my background and where I saw myself in the future. No technical questions. It was unclear from our discussion what kind of research this team actually does when I asked about it and tried to follow up during the portion where I was able to ask questions. One concrete thing he mentioned was testing how GPT could be applied. Great, but that's not research. Is BetterUp making yet another chatbot based on an existing chatbot? Throughout the entire first half of the conversation he kept adjusting his camera: it looked almost as if he had two cameras, one mounted on his monitor and another on his desk, and he kept switching between them. Overall the flow of conversation was rather awkward. Received a rejection a few days letter with a type of cult corporate speak about pursuing passions and so forth.
I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at BetterUp in Jan 2022
Interview
I really wanted to believe that I would not have the same interview process as so many reviews on here. Unfortunately, that was not the case. I applied early January and received a response two weeks later that I was moving through the process. There were five interview streps in the process:
1) 30m call with hiring manager
2) 45m technical screen: basic stats questions & coding in R exercises
3) 48hr take home assignment: R data analysis & study design (said 5-6hrs to complete but took me 2-3x longer)
4) Virtual onsite
5) Interview with senior exec
The first three steps went pretty fast (< 2 weeks), and I thought I would actually get through this process within a month. I turned in my take-home in early/mid Feb, and was told a week later that I had moved to the virtual onsite. Up to this point, everyone had been very responsive. I let the recruiters and hiring manager know that I had another job offer where I needed to make a decision by mid March. They said no problem - I would be able to finish the interview process by then.
Three weeks go by. I email every week asking for an update, which are answered but somewhat slowly. I was told that there was some internal stuff going on & they are waiting for the green light to schedule my onsite. Then, early March, I am told that the role was going to be closed due to "budget constraints". Needless to say, I was very upset - having already spent hours of my (unpaid) time going through this process. I asked if there were other similar roles that I might be able to apply for. I have yet to receive a response.
I can't recommend applying for a role here, at least right now. It seems that they are still experiencing start-up growing pains. I'm also not sure if the Labs division is being cut completely or just downsized, but "budget cuts" after an enormous funding round does not seem like a good sign.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What is a p-value? What is an effect size? What is a confidence interval? How do you explain NHST? Where is the error in this R code? Why do you want to work at Betterup? Where do you see yourself in five years?
