Following my online application I was invited to interview. This was a 1-to-1 interview with the assistant store manager. Questions were what you would expect: "Why did you apply specifically at Boots?" "What would you offer Boots?" "How could you make a difference here?" and a number of situation-based questions ("A customer comes and asks X, just as your colleague has asked you to do Y"). There were also practical questions, like did I have any holidays planned in November, December or January, because I would be expected to work through Christmas and New Year's. Now here's an important bit: I explained that, although I had no leave planned for November through January, I would be going abroad for a week in the days right after this interview (still in October), to care for family there. He wrote this on his forms that had my name at the top. Next, I was taken onto the shop floor, to a particular product display, and handed a specific product; a hand cream. I was instructed that I had five minutes to familiarise myself with the product, and that after that I would be given ten minutes to sell it. The manager left me to it and returned after five minutes, checked whether I knew the price and the offer it was part of, and then asked me who I would approach on the shop floor and how I would try to sell it. He agreed with my plan and also made some additional suggestions which I took on board. Then he tapped his watch and said: "Ten minutes start now. Sell it." Off I went and he kept a look at what I did from a distance. At first I had no luck convincing anyone to buy this hand cream, but I did find myself approached by a number of customers with other queries and tried to help them out (thank heavens I know the store because each of those customers asked where they could find a specific product). I figured if I didn't sell the hand cream because I'd been helping customers with other things, that should be alright, right? Thankfully, when the 10 minutes were nearly up, I got to chat to a lovely customer who not only liked the hand cream enough to buy it, she also bought two related products to get the 3-for-2 offer. After that the manager approached me and took me back to the office. He offered me a job there and then, and wrote my name into the staff schedule pinned on the wall. He told me I wouldn't have to start until mid November, and that HR would contact me to complete online training and make arrangements for in-store training. I reminded him that I would be abroad for a week and asked him to let the HR department know, so they could email me if they failed to get hold of me by phone, because I might not receive every call but I would be checking my email. Once again, he made note of this on his forms and said this would pose no problem, because they probably wouldn't contact me until November anyway. Two days later I went abroad for a week; I did receive phone calls there but none from Boots, nor any emails. When, a week after my return to the UK (and two weeks after my interview and verbal job offer) I still hadn't heard from Boots, I checked the online jobs portal where you can check the status of your application and it still showed as open, so I hit the button to contact HR and submitted a message asking if they had an update for me yet. This was on Friday 31 October. Then on Monday, I received a standard email "thank you for attending interview, but unfortunately we won't be taking your application further." So I picked up the phone to the number listed in the email, worked my way through the menus ("press 1 for..." etc.) the lovely person who answered my call explained she found no information on her system other than that my application was "withdrawn" rather than "rejected". I asked her to investigate what had happened and she said she would have to speak to the (assistant) store manager and the hiring manager. Twelve more days have since passed, I've called back several times but no one in the HR team had been able to speak to hiring manager or the (assistant) store manager, though they have come out with an explanation that they had "tried calling me for two weeks" which is blatantly untrue. Besides, all communication up until the interview had been done via their online portal and via email, so why they never used that to contact me, then...? So I'll be phoning again today; I guess there's no job after all, so I could just give up, but then at least I would like apologies and ideally a truthful explanation. I am gutted because I really would have liked the job and I would have been good at it.