The position was advertised on a local job board and I applied through the C&G careers site. Five days later I received an invitation to an online interview. The invitation included a case study which required candidates to prepare a presentation for how they would plan the design stage of a project. However, the case study was quite badly expressed with many aspects of it being vague. Consequently I spent a lot of time wondering how to respond to it. It was hard to know whether my interpretation of the case study was correct or not, which is very disconcerting when you are required to give a presentation in an interview. The other problem with it was that there was a time limit of 15 minutes to do the presentation. This was never going to be enough time to properly address the requirements of the case study. I knew that it would be difficult to do it within the allotted time without rushing it, which I did not want to do, but equally I didn’t want to miss anything important out. This made it even more difficult to know how to handle it. There’s nothing wrong asking candidates to do this sort thing but it’s hard for me to believe that they put very much thought in to it. Due to the vagueness of the case study, I spent a week and half on it, which is far too much time for a first interview. It would be far better to get all of the other questions out of the way first and save the exercise as a final test. This way candidates would not be wasting their time on this when they might be disqualified from the role at the second interview because the interviewers didn’t like their answers to the other questions. Consequently, I do think that they need to rethink this exercise because it is very wasteful of candidates’ time. The interview was with two project managers. The first question was about why I was interested in the organisation. It then immediately became apparent that there was confusion about what part of the organisation the role was for. The role had been advertised on a local job board as being specifically for one of the organisation’s local subsidiaries. However, this was not the case at all; the role was actually for City and Guilds and not the subsidiary. So all of the time that I spent learning about the subsidiary was wasted. Bizarrely, nine minutes in to my interview, I received a rejection email from the C&G recruitment team “We have carefully reviewed all of the applications...". It turned out to be a mistake but I never got an explanation for why it happened. I gave my presentation but the interviewers didn’t have any questions about it. After that there were some straightforward questions about project management methodologies and how I had applied them to projects. I was then given the chance to ask any questions that I wanted to ask. I was told that I would get the result by the end of the following week. A week later I received an invitation to a second interview. I was able to pick a day and a time so I selected a slot for five days later. The second interview lasted around half an hour. I was asked a range of questions about my experience and how I would respond in certain scenarios. All of the questions were perfectly reasonable but I do think that they could have all been asked in the first interview. It was disappointing that they didn’t take the time to look at a website for which I had been responsible for managing the development. I made a point of putting the link on my CV and cover letter to help the interviewers understand the work that I had been doing. This helps provide context to the answers that I give. At one point I was asked to give an example of a project for which I had written the requirements. I mentioned the link to the website on my CV and asked them if they had looked at it. As they had not done so, that killed that line of questioning and an opportunity for them to learn more about me floundered. So that area of my experience and competence went unexplored. The interviewers didn’t make much of an attempt to build any sort of rapport during either of the interviews. There was no small talk or “get to know you” chit-chat, so they came across as being somewhat impersonal. They weren’t unpleasant at all so it didn’t bother me much but it did come across as being slightly odd. Overall though, I thought the interviewers generally did a good job. They asked good questions and they tried to get a good understanding of my experience. I was told that I would be given the result by the end of that week. However, I actually had to wait until the following Monday. There was no feedback at all. I have given the interview a negative rating primarily due the vagueness of the case study and how much time it took to do, also because they incorrectly specified which organisation the role was for in the original advert and for sending me a rejection email while I was in the middle of being interviewed.