it never fails to amaze me how disorganised some organisations are when it comes to interviewing
had quite a few places where i’ve turned up 5 minutes before the scheduled time only to be met with puzzled looks from the reception staff who aren’t expecting anyone for an interview, or they make you follow them as they wander around the building trying to find out where the interview room is
I know. It’s amazing how trusting education authorities were when employing people. Apparently, you now need a criminal check for volunteer reading to kids.
For where I work now I had two because the recruitment agency I went through sent me to completely the wrong office for my interview.
So I had an interview with someone who had no idea about what I was applying for, and was furious about having to do it, followed by an interview a week later with the correct person who was instantly suspicious of me because of my terrible terrible first impression.
For my job I had 1 phone screening call with internal recruiter, 1 screening call with senior director. Then had an assessment day (but only for me), which was 3 interviews (one technical, one competencies, one director/business/commercial stuff), a case study to do with discussion, and a lunch presentation to give to the team.
On one hand it did seem pretty intense and a lot to go through, but I did actually value that they were looking at as much as they could, and it was really thorough. Maybe it appears inefficient, but hiring is expensive and massively costly if they get it wrong so I think having more interviews is becoming more common, but it’s still not the perfect way to assess a candidate for a job or know what they’ll be like.
Most satisfying interview experience was repeatedly ignoring phone calls and voicemail messages from somewhere that wanted me to come back for a second interview, but I thought they’d come of as cunts in the first one so wasn’t interested.
I didn’t get an interview for a job I applied for last week and I’m still irked by it because I absolutely nailed the criteria and the application. Just letting you all know that.
I feel your pain Geoff. HATE it when this happens. Always been for internal posts when this has happened to me, and its always been when they’ve already identified an internal candidate and it turns out they’re just advertising the role because HR/for a laugh.
Ha yeah it’s fine really - no-one is entitled to a job interview! Perhaps they were looking for people doing sideways moves rather than upward moves like I was looking to do but, still, genuinely perplexed as to how I didn’t even get shortlisted.
And yeah that’s a pet peeve where you go through the process only to be chibbed off by an internal candidate. I mean it’s just the way of the world but it’s a definitely irkener and justifiably so.
What counts as an “interview”? Current job I had was a round of 7 1hr-ish one-to-ones with different people on one day, followed by an hour and a half with the group MD on another, and that’d be pretty typical for here.
For my current job my boss started the interview by saying that she didn’t really do structured interviews and preferred to just have a chat through my experience and the role. Having been her co-interviewer on about a dozen occasions since I’ve realised that she actually rigidly structures the interviews but is so good at doing them that it just seems like a naturally flowing conversation. It’s a skill I would like to have.