I only made the first stage post paper sift, but it was rather poor. I was expecting a panel or some form of structured process or questions, instead it was a weird stunted awkward affair. A single person (presumably from HR) hosted and seemed to be a bit bewildered that they were talking to me and couldn't really understand anything I said or the context against which I was setting my answers- my opening ice breaker of the coming weekend being just as busy as work went down badly, I meant it as an allusion to child care and the general setting of modern life and I ended up having to unpick and explain it as a concept. I then got asked a single question about if I had done contract work before, to which I explained that whilst I had gained several contracts I had set out to found my own consultancy rather than be a hired hand going via agents and naively just waited for the phone to ring owing to not knowing any better (bad move on my part, but I was being foolishly honest). I then talked about my time in the civil service and mentioned I left after a role relocation gave me an extended valueless commute of three hours each way rather than the initial 45 mins. That was the end of the interview and I didn't progress as feedback was I was not prepared to work in business development or participate in travel, which is odd as neither of those questions were given directly to me and I currently manage global projects frequently traveling round the world and have recently set up and grown a clinical services business from inception to four clinics in two years. Still if a consultancy isn't able to run a basic interview and establish facts very well, I guess I dodged a bullet.