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“Unprofessional ”

written by Norwood34 on 03/09/2014

So Just dealt with this company I shall give you my experiences.

Firstly I received a call from one of their account managers in regards to a application I put in through the Monster website. They were fairly polite but honestly seemed a bit fake a over the top. The advisor did quite clearly lie a fair bit though stating they had spoken to X amount of people and only X% were being put through (judging by the assessment day, this is a lie). They say that your degree is effectively worthless and only use it to target graduates really and that they are effectively testing your personality.

Anywho.

Moving on I did a telephone interview which consisted of questions that were clearly designed to just try and catch me out and/or get a reaction instead of actually test competence for a specific Role. You can pass this by being able to answer any question they ask you and by generally being positive I found.

Next I was asked to fill out a online test on personality traits for the company I would be being put forward for. The main issue I have with this part of the process was that the Adviser I was speaking to told me the answers basically. Now I'm not a recruitment specialist, however, what's the point in doing the test if you are telling people what the answer is just so you can get them through. This misleads their clients and just means that even if you shouldn't reallllllllly be going through for this job that you still force your way through regardless. After this I was invited to attend an assessment day... (the fun begins)

I was called almost every day by the person looking after my application to ensure I would show up and with advice about what the assessment day would include. I was told to include a 3 minute presentation about the company and sales in general. Now. The amount of content they want you to include in 3 minutes is literally not possible and I found that either you spout generic rubbish with a spattering of Buzzwords. Or you effectively try and rush through a 5-10 minute presentation in 3 minutes...Ummmmm. So I prepared this presentation beforehand as best I could.

After being reminded another 2/3 times in 3 days about the assessment day It was almost time to attend. Now firstly, the assessment centre was at least a 2 hour Journey from the location of the job which was fine, but considering what happened at the actual centre you will see why I was a bit upset by this.

Assessment Day:

They ask you to be there for 9am. For a 10pm start. So I get up at 5.30am to ensure I am there on time...
I arrive at 9am annnnnd sit about in a hotel lobby for an hour with 30~ other candidates. Nobody from Pareto in sight. At 10am they show up and shuffle you all into a room with the most uncomfortable chairs imaginable after taking your photo in the lobby. Now the talking begins. It starts with a good chunk of things about Pareto and their history and sales things in general. They asked the question "who thinks sales is about having the gift of gab" If you said it was, you were apparently wrong. Which goes against everything they tell you about wanting a chatty and engaging personality but ... yeah, we'll just gloss over that part. Then everyone introduced themselves one by one stating a personal achievement and a famous celebrity of their choice. Now with this part It has been stated that unless your achievement related to either a Sporting event or travelling they showed little interest in regards to follow up questions. This wasn't necessarily that poorly done but it didn't half run on for a while with each person talking for 3-5 minutes each! Whilst this happened the Pareto people sat with clipboards jotting down things from time to time.

About an hour later it was finally time for the groups tests. Now without going into specifics it's basically just your standard survival things about items you would take and people you would save whilst a Pareto person watched the interactions. Again, this wasn't too badly done. The tests were designed to catch you out but were not too bad overall.

Then we breaked for lunch. Unlike some people on this thread we were provided food/coffee etc, it was extremely limited though and wasn't exactly enough to sustain a person for the 9 hours of this day...

**THIS IS WHERE THINGS REALLY GOT BAD**

After the break at about 1.40pm we were told they they would do another group assessment with the candidates interviewing each other (This didn't really happen though as people just sat and talked about other things).

The plan was basically that people would do that whilst people were randomly pulled out of the room to go over a small informal interview which was a set of question you had already answered about 10 times on the phone. Do you drive, would you move, etc etc NOTHING based on competency. The presentation were pretty badly done too as the list of people they had didn't reflect the people that were there and they kept losing peoples information and forgetting who had done what it seemed! All the while you had about 25 people sitting in a conference room twiddling their thumbs just speaking with some random Pareto guy about random things. This part of the day went from from 1.40pm -5.50pm. I. Kid. You. Not. 4 hours of just sitting about with a brief 5 minute gap to do small interview and 5-10 minutes for your presentation. This was highly unprofessional and quite honestly uncomfortable to deal with. The Pareto people were like headless chickens and were just making things up as they went along.

After finally doing all of that at the end the did the whole X-factor thing people have talked about. Now I really don't get this. It's very unprofessional to do it this way. The only reason for doing this seems to be because it's easier for them...so if it is unprofessional who cares? They split the group into 3 about 60% unsuccessful 30% maybe next time/possible job with Pareto (LOL) 10% you got through. Anyway I was in the 60%, now I wasn't too crushed honestly as I kind of just went along to this with little expectations anyway but I felt that the way they handled this really crushed some other people. So much so I almost felt like saying something at the time because some people were clearly visibly angry.

What happened was that as the final group was split off and the 60% sat in the Room the guy said, and I quote: "This is the part of the Job I hate. You haven't been successful. You can leave". No commiserations, no trying to have a positive vibe even slightly, nothing! I couldn't believe he left it with that! It was so rude and some people noticeably refused to shake hands with the Pareto folk after the fact! The worst thing in my opinion was the fact that people sat in that room in those uncomfortable chairs for 4+ hours with no content prepared being nothing but respectful to the Pareto Employees but when it came to the end of the day they showed nothing but disregard for these people's time because they didn't match what they were looking for on the day (which is fully understandable) but..just...wow. As I said I wasn't too bothered as I plan to do post-grad teaching and have my heart set on this after various volunteer/school work but I felt sooo bad for some of the poor souls just out of Uni having to experience the Pareto Law first hand.

TL;DR Can be worth going but Pareto are highly unprofessional so don't go in with an expectation.