Background: I came back from a 2-year caregiving gap and Genentech was one of the companies that actually moved forward with me. I was nervous about the gap question but it turned out not to be the thing.
Here's how the rounds went:
Recruiter screen (30 min): pretty standard. They asked about my background, why Genentech specifically (have a real answer here, vague mission-speak falls flat), and confirmed I was okay with the hybrid requirement.
Technical phone screen (60 min): SQL heavy. Two problems, one relatively simple aggregation query and one involving a window function across clinical event data. Not fake data, they use domain-adjacent scenarios.
Panel day (half day, 4 conversations): one was a hiring manager values chat, one was a peer data scientist who dug into a past project end-to-end, one was a cross-functional stakeholder who wanted to know how I handle disagreement with researchers, and one was a short presentation of a past analysis.
What actually mattered: the cross-functional question. Genentech has a lot of scientists who think in different terms than business analysts. They wanted to know if I'd ever had to translate between those worlds without flattening nuance. Have a real story.
The gap question came up once, briefly, and my honest answer landed fine. They seemed more interested in whether I was ready than whether I'd been away.