People are very nice and helpful. The steps in the interview process make sense for what the job requires. The people I interviewed with asked good questions and were friendly. Positive experience overall.

AnswerLab is low effort in "interviewing" candidates. This likely allows them to get more detail on a larger pool of candidates without putting in much time on their side...which feels like they're not super respectful of the time candidates put into the process from the other side. Let me explain the process and circle back to the above point: 1) There is a brief first call with a recruiter, 30min. and mostly basic questions. 2) A mock interview session. I was to design a moderated session (suggesting I spend 2-3 hours of time on the session prep, which is excessive for a UX interview) and then carry out my idea over a 30min mock session with an employee who was evaluating me. I was also expected to write up my findings/recommendations from the mock session, answer several questions that would typically be asked in an interview e.g. "name 3 reasons you want to work here" and then feature a portfolio of my work. This is on top of submitting a moderated user guide document I also had to create from scratch. Let me reiterate, after a brief 30min recruiter phonecall they expect a candidate to put in all this work whereas all their company puts in at this point is a 30min mock session where an employee pretends to be a participant. 3) Two easy final interviews that were mostly just behavioral questions, 45min each. There was a two week gap between each phase and after the final phase a full month elapsed until they reached out saying I wasn't selected (unreasonably long). As you can see from this process, I as the candidate am putting in all the work at the beginning, especially with creating a moderated session guide and answering questions in written form that could have easily been asked to me during an interview. Be warned: you are on your own in this job! There is little collaboration; you are going to be a team of just yourself working on projects. For some people they may love this as they get increased visibility on their work output, but this also means you're sitting by yourself doing all the work alone. This is consulting work so there is not going to be a great work/life balance (read the other reviews and know what you're getting yourself into) compared to working for in-house UXR. Let me point out some positives since it's not all bad. AnswerLab is a phenomenal way to rapidly build up experience in UX research and/or if you really enjoy lots of variation in your work and can deal with the heavy amount of work that comes along with fast deadlines. The employees themselves were extremely pleasant people and I enjoyed talking to them during the interviews but it doesn't really matter that much about getting along with them when you're doing work solo. If you're looking for a good way to break into UX, this is an ok gig, otherwise better opportunities exist.