The interview took place between 8:30am and 3pm on one day at the Bury St Edmunds location, with the final 45 minutes being presentation from members of staff about their work at the site. There were only four applicants, we were all required to complete a written exercise, group exercise, skills based one on one interview and technical one on one interview, with each of us having different schedules throughout the day. The written exercise was completed individually and lasted one hour. It required you to analyse a lot of information and list several key actions to be carried out, with explanations, based on this information. The group exercise lasted 35 minutes and involved each candidate receiving a different idea that they had to debate, with the group needing to decide on the best idea and present it to the staff in the room. The skills based interview was a one on one interview with a member of Thales' HR team, and followed the basic formula of a strength based interview. With questions based around team working and problem solving experience, it lasted around an hour. Finally, the technical interview was an hour long and conducted one on one with a member of the Bury St Edmunds site staff. This included giving a pre-prepared 10 minute presentation, which was specified in the assessment centre invite email a week prior to the centre. The rest of the interview was based around role specific questions and analysis of a few graphs/equations to test technical knowledge. Overall, the day was very relaxed and included a free lunch, with the staff confirming that should applicants be unsuccessful full feedback on the day would be provided to aid with future applications. Preliminary discussions on who to hire were conducted on the same day once applicants had left, and I was contacted by phone two days after the centre with an offer of a job.

Very simple telephone interview just making sure you're a real person and asked a few competency questions. Assessment centre was 9am until around 3pm consisting of 2 individual interviews, one competency and one technical, also there were 2 group tasks discussion based. They told us they would reach a decision just over a week after the assessment centre however I received nothing, I emailed them 1 month after the assessment and didn't get a reply. I emailed again after another month had passed and they said they'd let me know in a week (it was 2 weeks). I also didn't receive any feedback on the interviews even though they assured us we would.