Online Application
The first stage required putting down information about my university course, the modules I was taking and standard information about my past experiences, grades etc.
How to respond for success
I truly believe that my interest were well suited for the role. I made sure to include my involvement with charities all across the world, and my academic certification of my linguistic capabilities which were required for the role.
Expect a 14 day wait before advancing to the next stage.
Situational Judgement Test:
In this stage you will face the ‘world of GSK’ situation-based test which also has a numerical element. On the situation based side of things, expect essay-based responses to about 5 prompts. I definitely found the essay based prompts more challenging as I didn’t want to give answers that were generic or boring. For these, I tried to be as specific as I could all within the 1000 character limit.
Example
The questions generally focused on my motivation for the role and the strengths I thought would help in a role at GSK. I was also asked about my goals for the placement and what I hoped to achieve.
How to respond for success
I definitely don’t think I can stress enough how important it is to try to think outside the box with the written responses. It’s the best chance you have at showing how you think, before the assessment centre. For instance, I was asked about previous instances where I’d overcome a challenge, and I wrote about having to memorise lines for a school play!
Expect a 3 week wait before advancing to the next stage.
Assessment Centre
This was the assessment centre day. It lasted about 3 hours with a short break between. To prepare for this I did some research on the firm’s values, the statistics they were keen on reporting, the sectors they were investing into, etc. I really wanted to show that I understood their motivation and would be a great addition to the team.
Example
I was asked so many questions! The assessment day was broken down into stages. One of them featured me with an interviewer who asked about 20 or so questions for half an hour. These ranged from responses I’d give in certain situations to values I thought were most important to the firm. For some of these questions you also had no preparation time, so it really involved a lot of thinking on your feet.
The second stage of the interview put me with some other applicants in a group work exercise. We had about 20 mins to put together an “event” from a given information pack about vendors, patients and the reports from the laboratory testing of a hypothetical product. When the time elapsed, we were asked to explain in detail why we created the order of events in the way that we did.
How to respond for success
I think I really stood out in the group work task by initially asking everyone to take on a responsibility to ensure we were able to perform optimally. I was taking notes, someone else was watching time and someone else was reading from the information pamphlet we’d been given. This way, we were really able to stay on time and all get involved in the task. I also tried to make sure everyone was onboard in the decision-making process.
Expect around a 1 day wait before receiving a call offering you a position.
Situational Judgement Test:
In this stage you will face the ‘world of GSK’ situation-based test which also has a numerical element. On the situation based side of things, expect essay-based responses to about 5 prompts. I definitely found the essay based prompts more challenging as I didn’t want to give answers that were generic or boring. For these, I tried to be as specific as I could all within the 1000 character limit.
Example
The questions generally focused on my motivation for the role and the strengths I thought would help in a role at GSK. I was also asked about my goals for the placement and what I hoped to achieve.
How to respond for success
I definitely don’t think I can stress enough how important it is to try to think outside the box with the written responses. It’s the best chance you have at showing how you think, before the assessment centre. For instance, I was asked about previous instances where I’d overcome a challenge, and I wrote about having to memorise lines for a school play!
Expect a 3 week wait before advancing to the next stage.
Assessment Centre
This was the assessment centre day. It lasted about 3 hours with a short break between. To prepare for this I did some research on the firm’s values, the statistics they were keen on reporting, the sectors they were investing into, etc. I really wanted to show that I understood their motivation and would be a great addition to the team.
Example
I was asked so many questions! The assessment day was broken down into stages. One of them featured me with an interviewer who asked about 20 or so questions for half an hour. These ranged from responses I’d give in certain situations to values I thought were most important to the firm. For some of these questions you also had no preparation time, so it really involved a lot of thinking on your feet.
The second stage of the interview put me with some other applicants in a group work exercise. We had about 20 mins to put together an “event” from a given information pack about vendors, patients and the reports from the laboratory testing of a hypothetical product. When the time elapsed, we were asked to explain in detail why we created the order of events in the way that we did.
How to respond for success
I think I really stood out in the group work task by initially asking everyone to take on a responsibility to ensure we were able to perform optimally. I was taking notes, someone else was watching time and someone else was reading from the information pamphlet we’d been given. This way, we were really able to stay on time and all get involved in the task. I also tried to make sure everyone was onboard in the decision-making process.
