What I learned coaching my daughters through graduate recruitment
Thirty years of hiring helped me with some stages. Others were unfamiliar territory.
When one of my daughters started applying for graduate jobs, I assumed I would be useful. I had been hiring people for thirty years. I had signed off recruitment campaigns, written the questions, sat in the room and scored the answers. What I found out, over the following months, was that I understood recruitment from one chair, the one at the end of the process, and she was standing at the beginning of it, where I had never been.
Since then, I have done the same thing with my other daughter, one of my nieces and the children of colleagues and friends who heard I was willing. One of my daughters went on to take a graduate role at a large IT consultancy. The other moved into teaching after a degree in Business Management and Marketing. I helped with her application, and three years later we worked together again on an application for a teaching job in Manchester.
What follows is the graduate application route I encountered while helping. Not every employer used every stage, and the teaching applications followed a different route. These are the parts I came to understand from the kitchen table, over plenty of coffee, although as time went on I sometimes wanted something stronger.
The form
I assumed the CV was the application. It is what I had read for thirty years, and it is what I expected to be working on.
What arrived instead was an online form, with the CV as an attachment. The form had its own competency questions, its own motivation section, and in some cases a questionnaire about working style. Each employer’s form was different, and each took real time to complete properly. The CV still mattered, but a strong CV could not answer the form’s questions for her. Those needed attention of their own.
The change I found worth making was on the form’s competency questions, and it was the same change I would make on a senior application. The first drafts I saw described what a summer job or a society role had involved. Served customers, managed the rota, ran the social media. What was missing was anything that had been different because she was there. We went through each answer and asked what had actually happened as a result, and where there was a number, we used it. The answers got shorter, which felt like a loss to her and looked like a gain to me.
The tests
I assumed the tests were a formality. I had not paid them any attention, and I had never asked, in any campaign I signed off, what they were filtering out before the shortlist reached me.
The tests were a selection stage in their own right: numerical reasoning, verbal reasoning and situational judgement, taken alone and against the clock. They could bring an application to an end before an interview. Where a rejection message arrived, it offered little opportunity for a conversation about what had gone wrong.
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At this stage, the useful work was practice: becoming familiar with the format, the pacing and the way the questions were phrased. The young people I helped who did the practice sets did better on the real ones than they had expected. I cannot separate the effect of practice from everything else that contributed, but it gave us something practical to work on. My experience of hiring panels offered little guidance here.
The recorded interview
I assumed an interview meant a conversation. Someone asks a question, someone answers it, someone follows up.
What my daughter met was a webcam, a question on the screen, a short time to think and a fixed time to answer, recorded for somebody to watch later. No follow-up, no reaction, no way of knowing whether the answer had landed. I had never, in my career, asked a candidate to do anything like it, and I was not sure how I would have done it myself.
The change was to stop treating the timer as a target. The instinct, when a clock is running down, is to keep talking until it stops, because silence feels like failure. We worked on answering the question with a relevant example and finishing when the answer was complete, even with time left. The aim was a clear answer within the limit, rather than a short answer for its own sake.
The assessment centre
I assumed that once a candidate reached an assessment centre, the day would look like the recruitment I knew: a group exercise, a presentation, an interview with people in the room.
That was broadly right, and it was the stage at which I felt most at home. The competency interview and group exercise were familiar from my own hiring experience. That experience had already helped us with the form’s questions and with structuring answers. Here, I understood more of the assessment itself. Reaching this point, though, had required preparation for stages I had never had to navigate as a candidate.
The change at this stage was about the group exercise, and I needed reminding of it even though I had assessed group exercises myself. The instinct is to try to win the exercise. What an assessor is usually looking for is who moved the group forward, who brought in the person who had gone quiet, who kept an eye on the time. My niece prepared for one of these and watching her prepare was what reminded me that I had scored people for exactly that and had somehow not thought to say so.
What I would tell a parent
The employers the young people I helped applied to did not all use the same stages or put them in the same order. I had to find out what each application required before deciding how I could help. Knowing how to assess someone in a room had not prepared me for the whole route into that room.
So, if you are a parent trying to help, or an applicant trying to explain what help you need, start with the next stage of the application. Give the form’s questions as much care as the CV. Use practice tests to get familiar with the format. Prepare for a recorded interview on its own terms, including its time limits and lack of follow-up. If an assessment centre comes next, prepare for the exercises the employer has described. The most useful support is the support that fits the stage ahead.
I helped with my daughter’s application to the consultancy. She got the job. I did not get her the job, and I did not get anyone else one either. I sat next to some determined young people while they worked through a process that was harder and stranger than the one I knew. My hiring experience was useful, but I had to learn where it helped and where we needed a different kind of preparation.
I write more of these from both sides of the table at interviewtable.co.uk.
