Welcome to my first proper blog post!
I wanted to make my first post a round-up of a few top tips for Assessment Centres, as we’re well into AC season now for internships, placement years and graduate jobs. No longer do we have a simple 1 to 1 interview, whole days spent in a company’s office completing various exercises are the norm now, especially for large schemes where many people need to be assessed. In this post, I’m going to cover the most common activities I’ve experienced at Assessment Centres and how to ace them.
General top tips:
- Get the bloody basics right. A piece of advice given to me at the start of my placement year which has never failed me. Before attempting the more complex tasks of the day, don’t forget the simple stuff- turn up a little early, dress smartly, be polite. Which brings me to point 2-
- Be polite to everyone. It’s a relatively common Assessment Centre practise to see if candidates are polite to everyone they meet. You may, for example, be assessed by a group of managers- but be accompanied throughout the day by another employee. The group of managers may well ask that other employee how you were when the managers were out of the room, to see if you were different in front of different groups of people.
Group exercises:
You can almost guarantee there will be an exercise designed to test how you work with others and collaborate. Usually it involves some sort of problem given to you, which you have to solve together. Quite often I’ve experienced with a few minutes left of the task, one of the assessors giving us another piece of information which changes the direction we need to go in- as long as you don’t act panicked, and show you can adapt, it’ll be fine.
- You must contribute, don’t stay silent. If there is an opportunity to bring someone into the conversation who has been a bit shy, take that opportunity.
- Definitely don’t dominate, maybe some companies are looking for those who really take charge but I think it’s much better to assume that the company are looking for someone who can collaborate effectively and lead without dominating.
- I quite like a cheeky “Ooh, I can see we only have 5 minutes left- shall we get start working on our presentation?” showing organisation skills.
Long story short- if you come across as a nice person to work with, you will likely be fine.
Interviews:
I will write a whole post about interviews at some point, but for now, my top tips:
- The GOLDEN RULE of interviews is to always have an absolutely banging answer for “So, why do you want to work for XYZ?”. The only interview question I would ever absolutely guarantee to get asked in one form or another, there is no excuse for giving a bad answer. The tricky bit is getting the balance right between pre-preparing that answer and still coming across as genuine.
- At the end, they will ask “So, do you have any questions for us?”, always always ask a question. Failing to come up with a single question makes you look disinterested.
- Use examples even when they don’t specifically ask for examples. Give them more examples than they could ever want. Examples. Examples. Examples. Obviously everyone is going to say that they are a problem solver, so leave them in no doubt that you actually are a problem solver.
What other activities can happen at assessment centres?
- It’s fairly likely there will be an office tour. Again, be polite to the people showing you around, they may be asked for their opinion. Avoid saying anything which makes it sound like you think you already have the job.
- They may have asked you to prepare a presentation beforehand. No real advice I can give you on this one- except stick rigidly to the time they give you and make sure your slides look professional (use Design Ideas on Powerpoint if you’re not naturally creative).
- Common amongst Finance/Big 4 accountancy firms- the dreaded Maths test. These usually appear pretty hard, but the pass mark is usually lower than you might think. I got a D in AS level Maths and still passed the PwC maths test, for reference.
Phew, that was a long first post. Well done for getting to the end of it! I hope that was vaguely helpful. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn if you would like to chat about any of this!
Katie x
Adulting for Millennials 