At SIA Partners a word is not a word. They assure people about starting at a certain date to then disrespectfully take back those words because one doesn't have enough experience and doesn't speak German. My process: 1 - First I got contacted by the Managing Director to plan a first meeting at the HQ in Brussels with a Senior Consultant who conducted the first steps in the recruitment process, this went very well and I got a call with the question whether I wanted to come back for a second meeting. 2 - For the second meeting I was asked to prepare a business case about a foreign Financial Services / Insurances firm to enter the Belgian Financial Services / Insurances market. I presented my creative idea to the Partner of the Department of Financial Services & Insurances at the HQ and this was received very positively. The meeting was concluded with positive feedback and a description of the next and last step, a meeting with the Managing Director. 3 - Two weeks later I got a call with the words: 'We are sorry for the waiting time, it is a highly competitive recruiting process and we had to make choices. We want you to start the 15th of February, an offer and a final meeting with the Managing Director will be organised shortly.' => Until now everything went perfectly: 4 - Two working days later I get a call with the following words: 'We have bad and good news for you, in the end it turns out we have a candidate who has more experience and is quadrilingual (Dutch, French, English, German), so we won't be going further with you, we are sorry. But next year you can apply again, you have an excellent profile but just now we found a slightly better fit.' This is utterly disrespectful. Experience has never been an issue in the process and German has never even come up as a requirement. I still have no clear explanation why I got cancelled in the end, both my experience (I am a graduating student with one relevant internship) and my language skills (I am almost fluently trilingual) seemed to be positive assets in my two meetings, and now exactly those assets appear to be insufficient? I got baited by the supposed open and flat learning structure in the firm, but I don't believe this learning structure exists since 'experience' turns out to be crucial. Next to the fact that I got no decent explanation why I am all of a sudden not good enough anymore, first assuring I can start to then take back those words makes me never want to apply for or even contact this firm again. I feel the people I got the interviews and calls with are not the same that eventually made this final turn of events. This last stage of my experience with their recruitment process is highly unprofessional and I don't feel I got the real reason of my rejection.
