The recruiters approached me and we had a quick phone screening. Then there were easy online screening tests (situational judgment and logic/programming), all of which I aced, and within minutes of completing the coding test I was invited to a more in-depth interview, over Skype. We talked at length about my experience and the interviewer thought I was very well qualified for the job. I was invited to an Assessment Day for the investment bank client in London. I voiced concern over the fact that I would have to pay about £70 to take the train in from the north -- every other assessment day I attended offered to reimburse travel, but mThree refused. I was encouraged to go anyway; the consultant explained that having passed their screening, there was a good chance I would be hired so it would be worth it. They were only sending 7 people to the assessment day, all of whom they deemed great candidates, and the bank was looking to hire up to 10, so it seemed like unless I failed something on the day I would do okay. There was a mock interview with mThree before the assessment day to prepare me. I spent a full day preparing answers to the questions they said I was likely to receive and doing extensive research on the investment bank. The mock interviewer said I did very well. On the assessment day, the people running it were weird and rude. They asked me my age, which should be illegal, but I told them anyway, because I am a mature student who had to work for a few years to save up money for university, and I am not ashamed of that. My interviews with actual engineers and other staff went very well, and I was able to answer all technical and experience-based questions perfectly. Two said my experience was "very impressive". After the assessment day, the mThree consultant called me for a debrief. She said the feedback was very positive and that I would hear from them within 2-3 working days. A couple weeks went by with radio silence. Eventually I had to reach out to mThree and ask what was going on. Response: "whilst the feedback was extremely positive they informed us that they feel you are too experienced to join the internship programme" Either (a) they genuinely didn't want anyone with actual software development experience (in which case, why advertise that experience would be beneficial??) or (b) "too experienced" is a euphemism for "too old". Either way, mThree knew exactly what my profile was. They knew I was a mature student and they knew I had experience as a self taught dev. They even encouraged me to talk about my experience in the interview. TL;DR Don't follow their advice. Waste of £70 and multiple days of preparation, and they didn't even see fit to inform me of the outcome themselves, I had to get in touch to check. I guess as soon as they decide they're not going to get commission from candidates they drop all pretense of caring about them. Oh also, they reformatted all our CVs into an mThree template before passing them onto the bank. They somehow changed the spelling of my name, so all day people were calling me by the wrong name. My name is one of the most common western names and only 4 letters long, so this doesn't say much about their attention to detail.