Unfortunately, for me the experience with Alan Turing Institute was really poor, and left me with an impression that this was a disorganised recruitment process typical of a start up. It was particularly disappointing, because the organisation is resourced with an in-house recruitment team whose role is to look after the process and make sure it is professional.
It started by me seeing the role, getting quite excited and applying for it. So far so good. The role was open for a month, so nothing happened during that time. I have tried checking the status a couple of times on the recruitment portal, however their ATS is broken in a silly way in that it won’t let you login and asks you to change the password every time. This was very annoying and time consuming.
After the role closed, I have received 4 emails on 4 days which should really have been 1 email on 1 day. Why the interview process had to be managed in such a haphazard way escapes me - first email confirmed I was successful but nothing more. Second email named the date of interview but no other details. 3rd email confirmed my time slot and a couple other things, but all the fields in the email were mismatched with the information sent. The recruitment person I was communicating with confirmed there would only be 1 stage.
I then arrange time off work, and come to the interview nice and early. I get a message that things are running 15 mins late and to come later. I wait, come later - there is no one at reception, so I have to catch a person in the hallway to let me in. I then wait a further 45 minutes because interviews are running late - not exactly convenient when you’re working that day, but this would have been totally fine in itself, if it wasn’t part of a bigger picture of the chaos to come.
At the interview they told me there would be a 2nd stage (note - earlier they confirmed there wasn’t). The lead interviewer was professional and doing all the right things. The other two however were the definition of bad interviewers - bored, cold, unfriendly, unsmiling, uninspiring. One of them kept yawning mercilessly, and you could tell he’d rather be on holiday than listening to me - all of us would, but you are supposed to be professional. This attitude disappointed me very much, because I really wanted the job before I had come in, whereas in the middle of this interview I was so uninspired that I decided even if I got the call back I would turn it down.
Another part of the interview was that I was supposed to prepare a presentation on the role I knew nothing about beyond the ad. This task would have been better suited to 2nd stage once the interviewers clarified the role to candidates at the 1st stage (not that they bothered anyway).
I was told all the interviews took place that same day, so I was expecting to hear fairly soon. Needless to say, there was more than a week of dead silence, and after that I received a generic rejection email without any details or any feedback whatsoever, which I found extremely disrespectful. After the time I invested in preparing for this interview, presentation, taking time off work and waiting for their delays they couldn’t even provide feedback. To make matters worse, the rejection email implied that “the competition for their roles is extremely high” - I doubt that very much with the candidate experience they provide. The recruitment team really need to pull their socks up and do some work on sorting this out. Fix your system, fix your process, your attention to detail and the way you talk to people. I have been put off for life.
