Candidates applying for Policy Analyst roles take an average of 60 days to get hired, when considering 3 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at UCLA overall takes an average of 28 days.
Common stages of the interview process at UCLA as a Policy Analyst according to 3 Glassdoor interviews include:
Presentation: 50%
Phone interview: 25%
Group panel interview: 25%
Here are the most commonly searched roles for interview reports -
1) Phone interview with officer going into depth about my research experience, including statistics coursework taken, and field research experience mentioned on resume. (Easy)
2) Policy documents sent by mail in the morning. I was given 4 hours to extract qualitative information from documents and code it so that it could be analyzed quantitatively. (Difficult)
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What is your training in quantitative research methods?
I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at UCLA (Los Angeles, CA) in Sep 2017
Interview
I applied online for a Policy Analyst position with World Policy Analysis Center. I received an email about a month later to schedule a phone or in-person email (nice to have the choice). I elected for an in-person and met with 3 team members at once. The interview was extremely dry, and all three seemed very intent on being as formal and serious as possible, even much more so than other interviews I've had in fields like management consulting. Most of the questions were about my experience with both qualitative and quantitative research, my experience using different statistical packages, my comfortability with writing and policy analysis etc., as well as questions about my language expertise. Some of the questions did not make sense to me, and they didn't seem to want to explain when I asked, but i believe some of them lacked experience interviewing.
After a few issues with communication, which they were very patient over, they sent me a timed assignment to complete at home. The work was fair and probably very similar to the job itself. I felt that I had done a decent if imperfect job, but I never received any feedback. I continued to contact the office for updates weekly, but I received a rejection email 2 months after the process began. As I usually do, I emailed back just to ask why I had been passed over, simply to help me in my job search, but they never responded (it's usually 50:50 anyway). While the process was extremely long and lacked transparency, that is probably to be expected at a large university, and the coordinator was always good at getting back to my calls and emails.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Explain the methodologies that you have used in your research.
I applied online. I interviewed at UCLA (Los Angeles, CA) in Feb 2016
Interview
I had an in-person interview with 2 people. It lasted about half an hour. Pretty much all of the questions were behavioral ones. The next step was a coding data test. I completed the test and sent it in, but I never heard from them again.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
They wanted to know what kind of quantifiable research I'd done in the past.