Burlesque Babe's Re-building life but back in debt diary

poppy_the_saving_cat

Good luck for today

Alison xxx

moonlightpjs

Good Luck for today hun, thinking about you xxx

Gemmzie

Good luck from me too x

beanielou

Hope it all went well today hun

boredofbeingathome

Sits waiting to find out......fingers crossed.

pepe2008

legs crossed....

Ellidee

Everything crossed !

Bunnyinthelights

Blimey, that must be some interview!

WHERE'S BB!?!?!?!?

Burlesque_Babe

I'm here I escaped at 4.30pm!! :eek::eek::eek:

Thankyou for all the lovely thoughts, it means a lot to me.

I have to say though - I really don't think I will be the successful candidate :rotfl:

OH dropped me off and picked me up and saved me £5 in parking :T

4 other candidates - 2 of which I know and both have strong connections to where I work so I think it will get out that i've been for an interview :rolleyes:

OK - first off was the finance test _pale_ I was expecting some kind of online numerical reasoning thingy - but no. Calculators, pens and paper were distributed.

Task 1 - Departmental budget sheet ledger thingy. Detailed list of what money is spent on (ie salaries, IT support), then the allocated annual budget for each, then the spend to date (given as month 4)

'Calculate the percentage of unspent budget in each area'. OK - I could do that.

'Estimate and write in the forecast column the forecasted figure for each area'...............erm, think I did that ok, but may have ballsed up, but don't think so, I explained to OH how I did it and he said that was correct, but it felt a bit like wading through treacle at one point in the middle. For those who watch Apprentice, it could well have been my Sandlewood moment :rotfl:

Write bullet point notes for an imaginary meeting to discuss the year end forecast. Erm, ok. Never done this before but hey what the hell. I stuck down things like

- 7k spent on temp. staff to date. Nil allocated in budget. Need to stop use of temp staff.

- £20 spent on transport costs - under useage of budget (£550 annual).

- Overspend to date on books/periodicals. Put a hold on further spend.

-Huge overspend on Personnel support - is this an ongoing cost? Investigation needed.

Plus other similar bullet points

I think that may be the kind of things I should have been writing - god knows?

Task 2
You can apply for up to 75k for a grant for x project (I can't remember the detail) The money can be used for 12 months. Write a brief plan and budget request. :eek:

I said (very briefly!!) I would need money for staff (I said 1x FTE and 1x.5 FTE), support services (telephony, IT, personnel) and supplies (IT equipment, training budget etc)

I gave rough (literally made up!) numbers next to each one and it came to £60k. The accountant who oversaw the task said there was no right or wrong answer - bloody good job really! I really don't know if that was the idea or if the accountant would be crying with laughter in a corner reading it.

Total time allowed for whole task? 45 minutes :eek::eek::eek::eek: I started task 2 with 10 minutes to spare. The others did task 2 with 5 minutes to spare :eek:

Then - OPQ personality test. I've done these before, whether I'm a leader, a creative, an innovator etc. Just depends what the results are and if that's who they want. I normally end up being a creative type person.

Then - the whole department piled in to this tiny room and we could ask them questions. They then asked us about what we'd done.

Lunch was 30 minutes late :rolleyes: so interviews put back.

I should have gone in at 2.15pm. Changed to 2.45pm. Went in at 3.25pm :rolleyes:

They loved my presentation. I think I did ok on the general background questions.

However, I got really stuck on some questions about data management and research management and the guy kept pushing and pushing - why would you do that? how would you do that? Yes, but how would you do that? It was awful, I mean really awful and the weakest area of my experience and to be honest, I didn't even understand a couple of the questions properly about data monitoring - I've just never done it, let alone managed people who do it. I know I did abysmally poorly with those questions. I felt so uncomfortable and the job felt more and more like a data/information/research 'dry' post rather than a creative, partnership working, community type post with some data/research attached.

Successful person to know by end of week.

It won't be me :rotfl::rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

sammy115

Burlesque_Babe wrote: »

Successful person to know by end of week.

It won't be me :rotfl::rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

Stranger things have happened BB...sounds like a comprehensive interview but good practise when all is said and done....

Good on yer for doing it at all...:T