Had to send a CV and covering letter. I then got an email (not a phone call I might add) some weeks later with a huge list of things they wanted from me 'to get to know me a little better'.
The list was pretty long and alarm bells did ring when I was asked for lots of ideas for their forthcoming campaigns (see below in questions).
I wrote a disclaimer on mine saying that the ideas were mine and that should I not get the job, they couldn't use them. Glad I did as often companies like this are just fishing for ideas - not saying they are, but it's rife. I can imagine the pay was awful as they asked for my salary expectations, another very big no-no.
If I were to get asked for this much information again, I'd either charge them for it , or say it would take me too long so would only be willing to do half an hour's work on their premises, so I could scope them out.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
This was the second stage in the process (not actual face-to-face interview)
1. Why would you like to work for Eagle & Fox?
2. Why do you think you would be good at this role?
3. Our Tartan Blanket Co. A/W range of blankets and scarves will be arriving for launch in September. We’d love to see a written example of a social media post or campaign that you would use to introduce or encourage excitement for this launch.
4. We want to develop our Kilt Society brand voice. Please example how you would market our traditional product to the modern man. This can be an email marketing concept, social media post or campaign, blog post idea or PR opportunity.
5. What are your salary expectations?
6. We'd love to see examples of your content work, be it personal or professionally published. This could be an Instagram profile, blog article, press release etc
Please link to any examples you may have and describe the project.
Thanks for taking the time to share your experience and for the feedback. It's really valuable to understand this from your perspective and we'll definitely update our hiring process as a result of this.
We're a small business so we're by no means expert at hiring and one of the things we've struggled with is developing a good interview process to make sure that we're a good fit for the candidate and the candidate is a good fit for the role.
The motivation behind asking for ideas was to get an insight into how a candidate would approach doing the role should they join the team. We didn't intend to steal ideas or make the candidate feel like we were taking advantage of the situation so this feedback is really valuable in that area. We'll update how we interview so that people in creative roles don't feel like they're giving away ideas but that we can still get a feel for how someone would approach solving a creative task.
With regards to salary we're quite open as a company and want to encourage candidates from different backgrounds or levels of experience so this was intended as a positive thing to be inclusive rather than exclusive. I appreciate how it could be seen as a warning sign so again something for us to improve on.
I'm sorry that your experience with us wasn't all that you'd hoped it would be. We often get a lot of candidates applying for roles so we use questions like this to help us get a perspective on someone's values, strengths/weaknesses and what they're passionate about. But, we can definitely do a better job of doing that so thank you for your input.
Fergus
Co-founder
I applied online. The process took 7 weeks. I interviewed at Eagle & Fox (Edinburgh, Scotland) in Jan 2018
Interview
Extremely lengthy, spanning several weeks and with copied and pasted communications from the employer. They were excellent at hiding the fact this is essentially them getting free work from vulnerable job seekers. The salary was not advertised, and it works out as just above minimum wage and they are very curt with answering valid questions about contracts and HR details. It appears that they re-advertise the same role(s) over and over again, just to get a new pool of people to steal ideas from. Very sorry that not only I, but 2 colleagues/friends went through this same process in 2018 and suffered.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Plan, Create, and Present an entire marketing strategy for launching a new range of blankets.
Sorry to hear that your experience with us was so bad. We definitely struggled around that time with our marketing department and we made some mistakes in the way we hired people. With hindsight we learned a lot but that doesn't excuse our impact on other people.
Our development and learning around how we manage people has been huge over the last few years and hopefully will continue to improve and develop. We want to be a great place to work and we want our team to feel safe, supported and cared for. Clearly we weren't doing that very well so I apologise for your experience with us.
I appreciate that applying for a job can be an exciting but vulnerable experience so we definitely need to be better at how we respond to that.
Thank you for taking the time to share your feedback. We need feedback to learn how and what to improve.
Fergus
Co-founder
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