Dreadful Civil Service Recruitment - Role Play?!

[Deleted User]

Do you no longer want the job? You don't say whether you want the job or received feedback. You could have thought it went wrong when it may have been passable, blimey, imagine if all recruitment goes like Who's the boss aired on bbc2..

Myself I've had a couple of good 'sprung upon' role plays to get the job, then lost plot on the role play needed to determine if I had passed induction, in my experience interviews that normally have this at interview, well the induction/training would have been chock full of the same stuff as well so you've potentially saved yourself a load of agro - least you discover now.

I'm sorry you didn't get to decide if you wanted to cancel - Most insurance and financial companies would have let you know in advance the exact nature of assessment, if you want to sock that to them.

FBaby

What you don't seem to realise is that it has nothing to do with the actual scenario, but how you deal with a situation where you are put on the spot, expected to deliver with little time to prepare, little information to go by and have to show initiative and creative thinking.

I have been involved in that sort of recruitment and it is extremely telling. I was amazed at how some applicants who came across as very much in control during the face to face interview with questions they expected totally collapse when put under the uncontrolled environment of the scenario interview and vice versa. The actual role play was in many way very representative of what the candidates would face in the role, so if they hated it, it is likely they would have hated the job too, so not selecting them was probably a blessing on both sides.

tomtontom

I've done role play exercises at EO and HO level. They're "sloppy and uncontrolled" because they want to see you think for yourself, they don't want someone that can only work from a script.

If you don't know something, then you explain you don't have that information to hand and you agree a time frame to get back to the customer. If the customer pushes you, you explain you want to be sure they're getting the right information so you will call them back. There's not a right answer in these situations, just a right way to handle things.

I'm not sure how you were not aware there would be a role play. CS recruitment is very transparent, did you read all the information you were sent? If you applied via the portal you can check it now. Also the public sector board on TSR is very handy for getting tips on the process, maybe worth doing some more research if you're not successful this time.

BigAunty

tomtontom wrote: »

I'm not sure how you were not aware there would be a role play. CS recruitment is very transparent, did you read all the information you were sent? If you applied via the portal you can check it now. .

Actually its my bad. I re-read and it did flag up a role play on the interview invite, albeit not on the JD, so you are correct there.

BigAunty

duchy wrote: »

In all honesty that doesn't sound unreasonable for a phone role .....would you have felt better if they'd given you a headset ?

I think I would have felt better if my 'customer' didn't switch back into Civil Servant employee mode, shuffle her notes and announce the end of the assessment when I hadn't finished to pretend ending my fictious call by stating the obligatory closing question, as per the brief, for starters.

Or if they had a telephone based interview as a selection stage so they can hear if the applicant has a professional telephone manner and the ability to form a rapport.

Or if they used another sift test, such as the online situational judgement one,which is designed precisely to see how well the candidate can make effective decisions and interpret data when under time pressure. It at least compares candidate performance on a more rigorous basis, providing a quantitive summary of how well they performed against others who took the exact test.

However, I now accept the points made by others as to the purpose of role play so I'm just going to have to suck it up in future or avoid applying for jobs which employ a method that I regard as crude and which makes me sqeamish because of its artifice.