Quite disorganised. My telephone interviewer was someone else to whom I had researched (so this came as a bit of a surprise to me, addressing the wrong person), and then my in-person interview took a significant time to organise with long wait times for responses and rescheduling. When I arrived, the HR recruiter had not read my application as she asked what university I attended. Considering I had travelled across the country to be asked this, I felt quite disrespected. In addition, the interviewer was constantly looking at the clock behind me (which was very distracting) and spent the vast majority (80%) of the interview running through an acronym they use to complete their work (BREAD). In all honesty, I thought quite highly of the company beforehand, most likely because they are very aggressive in marketing themselves as a vibrant, fun startup to work for and place a huge emphasis on campus recruitment (targeting all the top universities). They have the fancy offices overlooking the River Thames, swings, indoor grass, a good graduate salary considering what they're doing - but the role is really for someone who doesn't know what they're doing with their career. I can't see many people staying for longer than a couple of years at best, which is what most profiles on social media confirms. From my understanding (we spoke about BREAD long enough to give me authority on this), an associate role involves 95% of your time on the phone, contacting people from their internal network and seeing if they are willing to be paid to give industry advice to someone (mainly consultants) who don't have the time to do it themselves. I asked, but was not told, how often they resort to LinkedIn if their internal network fails. I would therefore hazard a guess and say that LinkedIn spamming constitutes a large amount of your day. Additionally, I was told by someone who just took a graduate role there, that for the first year you are not actually allowed to contact clients directly, but you do all of the online research and vetting for someone more experienced to handle the call.

Easy scheduling, recruiter helped with questions I had. Able to freely schedule my interviews. There was a few interviews, some short some long. Didn’t take too long to receive offer.