I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at BASF (Ludwigshafen am Rhein) in Oct 2018
Interview
They first called me from BASF to have me go there for the first step of the interview: too bad they didn't even notice I was living in England (they told me after I had booked everything and they wanted me to cancel my bookings), so in the end I went there to have a 30 minutes chat I could have had on Skype.
Anyways, the first chat went well, and they invited me for the second round of the interview, which lasted all day. I chatted with several people and had a challenge to identify relevant information in a patent, and to list the computational challenges in extracting these data automatically. I think it went ok, but they didn't give me any feedback at all, at least I could have learnt something. In one of the chat, the guy (head of some group) was even trying to be funny making jokes on my nationality, which was not appropriate at all. Also, in this second round, my perspective boss, was busy and could not participate in my interview, so why did you make me fly in that day?
At the end of the day they told me they would not offer me the position, which it was fine because Ludwigshafen is really an ugly place.
One more comment on refunds: it took forever. I spent about 800 euros to go there twice and sleep somewhere, and they were not giving it back to me. They were even questioning my flights: I lived in Liverpool and I flew from Manchester, and they wanted to know why.
800 euros for BASF is peanuts, for me, well, it was 30% of my salary, for which I have to work 1 month. The treatment I received was at least disrespectful, I would say outrageous. And they didn't even refund me all my expenses.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Identify all chemical information and list the difficulty of extracting it automatically from the text.