I had a virtual interview, following an assessment of my CV and cover letter. I had high hopes for this organisation - employee owned, diverse and interesting set of projects to work on, lots of contact from HR, and them seeming to care about the application process being seamless and clearly outlined. Unfortunately the interview process gave me the exact opposite impression.
The interview didn't get off to the best of starts - the hiring manager arrived 5 minutes late, and then the next few minutes were spent trying to work out what had already been discussed by me and the other interviewer.
I've done a few interviews recently and this has been the worst for me in terms of the attitude of the interviewers and line of questioning. Both had worked at Steer for pretty much their entire careers. I've done quite a few different things in mine, and the overall impression I got was that they thought that this was a bad thing, and possibly a sign that if they hired me I was going to jump ship. They didn't seem particularly interested in what I had to say, and it really felt from their tone and the line of questioning that they didn't want to be there - I'm sure they had a lot of applicants but, as I say, I've never got this impression from any other interviews I've done at similar consultancies. One of the questions was about why I left the first job I got out of university after 2 years (more than ten years ago) - OK, this can be a legitimate thing to ask, but it felt very much like this was more interrogation than interview.
Then there was a random question thrown in - 'how many bus stops are there in London'. I totally get the idea of these questions is to see how you think under pressure, but normally you get some idea of what the answer they are looking for is (do you want me to describe how I might get to the answer? do you want me to provide an estimate? do you want me to do a combination of these things, showing my working?). Or even any guidance at all. It turned out they did want you to work out an answer, taking into account things such as an estimate for the number of stops served by multiple routes, etc, but this only became apparent after (quite a lot of) trial and error, which blew my confidence a bit and made it hard to think.
After I got the result of the interview I requested feedback - radio silence from HR and none provided.
Overall a pretty negative experience. I think the interviewers could have done with a bit of training on how to conduct them to be honest, and even though you might not want to be there, accept that this is an hour out of my day as well, and I've had to do quite a lot of prep in the background as an applicant to get this far. A bit more of a positive attitude wouldn't go amiss!
