Hi there, Firstly of all thanks so much for taking the time to leave this review. My name is Olivia and I am Head of TA, and I wanted to take full accountability for this. I'm sorry you have had this experience. In my role, this is really useful in helping me understand your experience at phone screen stage, which quite obviously wasn't good and we would expect much higher standards. I am taking away a lot of learnings from your review, and will speak to the team about how we can do better. The reason we find it important that the very first contact is a phone interview is that it gives us a good understanding of candidates that may be a good fit - we want to see generally how someone would align to our ways of working. We also feel an initial phone call allows a candidate to find out more about our culture, how we work and find out if they want to continue the process with us as well. We're really lucky that we're growing and have a huge amount of interest from candidates applying to our roles so it isn't possible for us to invite every candidate at application stage. The last thing we want you to do is feel this is a pointless stage of our interview process. If you would like to talk, you can reach me on olivia.brown@octoenergy.com Thanks Olivia