So...

I've been seriously busy with interviews lately. It's getting very late in the year for applications for graduate schemes starting in September so I'm being fast-tracked through the processes I'm applying for.

One of these was Allianz Insurance. That interview was on 11 July 2007, which was a Wednesday, in a fairly isolated village called Horsley which is miles and miles from Nottingham. Allianz voluntarily made hotel arrangements for Tuesday night, which was very good of them.

The trip down was more or less eternal. The Midland Mainline trip from Nottingham to St. Pancras was lovely as ever, but the ticket I'd bought said to take the tube to Vauxhall and then a connecting train from there to Horsley. Now... Vauxhall is on the Victoria line of the Tube, but not on any other lines. And... the Victoria line was closed beyond Victoria station. Some sort of gas leak - I couldn't quite hear because the guy must have been more or less mumbling into his microphone and everybody else in the horrifically crowded rush-hour tube train wouldn't stop talking or turn down their loud headphones. So, after an endless amount of time spent standing with my head bowed (because I couldn't stand up straight, because of the shape of the trains) and wondering why on Earth the Tube isn't air conditioned, I exited Victoria station and joined the melee for the bus.

I've seen crowded buses before, but this was unreal. I don't know if it was because of the closed Tube line, or whether it was a regular thing, but there were literally hundreds of people crowding for these (thankfully multitudinous) buses. If I didn't have an Oyster card on me I'd have been in trouble in the scrum for entry to the buses (and I now understand why they waste the space and have a separate door to get on and get off on London buses - because there's no way to get out through all those people). As it was, I studied a map or two and found a bus to Vauxhall station fairly easily. Super!

I think I missed the connecting train but another one turned up eventually. It was on this train that I realised that it had originally departed from London Waterloo, an infinitely better-connected station, and that if thetrainline.com had simply instructed me to catch my train there instead, I might have, you know, caught it. Stupid computers.

Anyway, having looked at the map of Horsley I'd gone "eh, I'll get a taxi to the hotel". It turned out Horsley was such a tiny and insignificant place there was no taxi rank. It also turned out to be large enough that the plod to the hotel (past the interview location, which I took note of) was quite lengthy. I made it there in the end, not without the aid of my MP3 player (have I mentioned? I bought one for £12, it holds 1GB of my typically eclectic musical selections, Brian Eno's "Music For Airports" proving particularly soothing in central London). The Ramada Jarvis hotel turned out to be a fairly nice place indeed... one of those places where you need a credit card to book. I don't have a credit card, which proved problematic since it turned out that neither had my booking been paid for. So I had to plump down about £100 of my own from my debit card to cover it. Kind of unfortunate.

The room was very nice - appropriate to the amount of money involved, I suppose. Nice flat screen television with one of those multimedia interactive menu things where everything costs something - like £1.99 if you want to listen to an album from their jukebox, for example. (!) I'm always nervous of taking advantage of corporate hospitality so I declined, and didn't request any dry-cleaning to be done either, even though I'd travelled in my suit (I now make a solid effort to travel light when I'm going through London). I wasn't hugely hungry but it was now around 9pm - having left home at 3:30 - and the dining room was closing at ten so I decided to eat something.

Mental note - next time I am eating alone, take reading material. Also, if I'm not hungry, just order a starter. Not the smallest-looking main course on the menu, which appeared to be the steak.

The lady brought me a bread roll, which I nibbled half of. She brought me a compliments-of-the-chef prawn cocktail because the steak was going to take a while and I didn't manage to tell her that the bread and the prawn cocktail would combine to fill me completely and that she could cancel the steak. I nibbled the prawns a bit and then she took them away. I coughed, embarrassed. The steak arrived, gigantic, so I ate all the meat and nibbled the chips and vegetables and then she took what was left of that away as well. I coughed, embarrassed, again.

Slept well, toddled back to the interview location. Now, this was a little bit of an enigma. It turned out that these were conference rooms which had been hired by Allianz Insurance (and some other parties at the same time), not the actual Allianz buildings themselves, which I never got to see. Pity, seeing as the restaurant was so awesome (more on that later).

So, anyway, there were... eight of us, I think, for two remaining places (and if they didn't get enough good candidates for those places, they were planning to hold another assessment centre). To start with there was an overview of Allianz Insurance which... wasn't really very informative, and contained too much about the actual staff of the company. It didn't look like a particularly attractive graduate programme from my point of view - too much insurance, not enough IT. But at this point I can't be fussy.

There was a case study thing. Now, I've had some experience of these now, but this one was unbelievable. We were given like 35 pages of information about this hypothetical insurance company (and its competitors) to wade through, to construct a list of the company's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. I got 15 pages into it before I realised I had no time and needed to be taking notes at the same time, not afterwards. Still, bashed out a lot of good content, as far as I know.

There were breaks all the way through the day, but they really weren't very restful. I hardly got to make contact with the other candidates because everybody was always being whisked away to other rooms, and the entire time we were supposed to be relaxing we were being kept company by two current IT graduates who were supposed to be answering our questions. In other words we had no real downtime, or freedom to talk to one another about the interviews candidly.

The differentiator interview was the first and worst of the three. I can handle questions about times I worked in a team, or when I encouraged others, but not two dozen of them. There were too many! It went on and on and I had to be candid about my lack of networking skill or experience - that's networking in the "making contacts" sense, not the "computer network" sense. Bad.

Then we were back to the case studies, this time making up a 15-minute presentation of 3 main recommendations for the future of this fictional company. Again, I've been gaining experience with these - I think I did really well. The company was lagging behind, technologically, I said. New technology internally, externally and new training for the employees to learn how to use said technology. The presentation seemed to last exactly the right amount of time and I think I capably fielded a lot of good questions. Positive result!

I think lunch came around here. Now, this was a seriously nice venue with a lot of hard wood, brown leather and shiny cutlery - it was a pity I wasn't terribly hungry and only had leek and potato soup and an apple while everybody else ate a full hot meal. It was even more of a pity that I managed to dip my tie in my soup while sitting down and get soup all over me. I ended up trying to conceal this for most of the rest of the day, which was deeply embarrassing.

There was an "aspirational" interview was... if I can remember this correctly... more about what I wanted from the company in turn. Once again, I made the point that I was in it for the technology, not the insurance. Fair, I guess, but probably not so good for my chances.

The technical interview was mainly just to see what kind of technical knowledge I had already - mainly it was me being prodded to recite some stuff about software development processes and testing which I really didn't have any direct knowledge of. The best I could do was demonstrate that I learn fast by picking up the clues fairly quickly.

And finally... the role play. Zarquon. I had to take the role of some graduate investigating possibly flood-related productivity shortfalls at some office in Wiltshire. And drag information out of this regional manager. This was just creepy. He was either being reticent and uncommunicative or acting like that. Either way, weird stuff.

So I came out the other end thinking it went about 75% well. On the other hand, the prospect of actually getting this job was kind of worrying. I don't know if I was subconsciously undermining myself but a few days later (remember this happened a week ago) I was phoned and told I hadn't succeeded in passing, for exactly the reason I suspected: not enough oomph in the networking/customer focus area. (Good presentation/communication skills. Interview business examples lacking. Lacking in teamwork experience and external (non-academic) development...) Apparently, if they had a purely technical role going, they would have hired me - and I'd have been happier about being hired, too - but as it was they felt I was unsuitable for IT/Insurance for the same reasons I did.

Well, turnaround time was fast, at least. MEANWHILE: fast-track Fujitsu interviews, recently finished, awaiting results! More on this when I find a moment to type. This has been a LONG week for me.