Group Interviews - Experiences, Perspectives and Opinions
Has anyone here had a group interview before?
My first ever job interview was a group interview; the job I was applying for was multi-functional staff in Cineworld. On the day of the interview we found out that there were 60 people in total being interviewed for a small handful of positions (they never told us the exact number). I walked into the bar in which we were asked to wait before the interview began to find about 18/19 others (they were doing 3 groups of 20) - at a guess there were about 13 graduates and 6 foreigners in the mix, I believe I was the only school leaver there, and certainly the youngest.
I was shocked already at the number of graduates, was the London job market so bad they couldn't find something better? Seems not. I wasn't as worried about competing against the foreigners for the job as most of them had trouble even speaking English, which was necessary for communicating with customers, right?
We were taken to the dressing room (which was at the top of an abnormally long spiral staircase) and crammed together in a rectangular sort of circle. We started by saying our names, the last movie we watched and our favourite movie. I made my favourite a more sophisticated movie (The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas) in order to show my interest, but not being too fanatical about it. After all the job is selling tickets, popcorn and cleaning the screens out, not reviewing movies in depth; and just because you know a lot about movies doesn't mean you'd be any good at the job, right? One guy in the group went right in depth about his movie choice, suggesting that he was there for the free movies perk over anything else.
Our first task was daunting. We each had to pick a word out of a bag and then talk for one minute on that subject. The words ranged from Hot Dogs to Cinema Toilets, I got 'Baseball Hat'. We didn't get to pick the word out until our turn arrived so nobody had any preparation advantages other than the lucky two who got the example words. This exercise must have been designed to test thinking speed, although rather biased as some words were much easier than others.
Next we were put in groups of 4 and were given a scenario in which we had to order priorities from 1 to 10 and give reasons for why we did so. There were no right or wrong answers (apparently, we still had to give them in named), they just wanted to see the way we worked with others. Of course getting the answers into a logical order was also required, but I think the mistake absolutely everybody made was thinking that they were looking for people who were putting safety first and so focused on that over their team interaction skills, a distraction in disguise. Naturally safety first should be a no brainer anyway.
Up next was an exercise where as a group of 4 we had to create a story using only words that were up to three letters in lengths, and at some point had to include the word Cineworld in the story. They gave us an example of one created in a past interview, which pretty much covered all the short words there are. The winners were to receive a prize (cinema tickets).
I personally took this as an opportunity to show that I approach things with a plan, and so got my group to make a brainstorm full of three letter words, and was quite happy that one of the managers looked at it as we were doing it. Unfortunately we didn't win the task, another group did who'd cheated and used some 4 letter words (which were overlooked), in the end I think they didn't take the planning into consideration and were using it to again see how quickly people could think (or rather how large our vocabularies of up-to-3-letter words are).
The final exercise was a quick couple of individual tests (easier than GCSE) which tested us on our maths abilities and how we'd react to three different scenarios.
I walked out of that interview quite annoyed at how it went, I'd already looked online at people's past experiences of interviews at Cineworld, but unfortunately each location does interviews differently and most were about one on one interview experiences. Being well prepared for this interview was near impossible, it's really designed to catch you off-guard.
What makes me really angry at this type of interviewing process is that it is done to see how you work as a member of a team (as well as getting a large number of interviews done in a shorter space of time), but I believe it just doesn't work the way it's intended.
Lots of people can work well in a team, but to work well in a team you need to get to know your team and adapt the way you work to the way other people in the same team work, this takes time.
Looking at the people who seemed to be the best team players, it was quite obvious as another member of their team that they're acting, and could possibly be a worse team player than they make out to be. One of the women in the interview acted extremely friendly as if she knew everybody in the room (unnaturally happy, much like you'd expect a cult member to be), which alienated others, yet still managed to make herself look good.
For a first interview ever this has to have been the worst style I could have hoped for, even a one on one interview would have been nerve-wracking enough as it is, but this was plain horrible. I spoke with one of the other applicants afterwards who was a graduate, and he said he'd never had an interview quite like it before.
The number of graduates I was up against for a near minimum wage job was appalling, I was expecting more school-leavers like myself to have been applying.
I have another job interview tomorrow for a different cinema chain, and my heart dropped when I found out the interview was to be a group interview, and was what led me to write this.
What are your experiences, perspectives and opinions on group interviews?
