As someone who has been involved in countless interview & assessment day processes (as an interviewer and interviewer), I can honestly say I’m sincerely disappointed in Octopus and their overall process. It starts off relatively straight forward - you submit your CV and fill out a few questions for the application and if you pass this round you’re invited to a screening call with your recruiter. Following this, however, if successful you are invited to what is essentially an assessment day with around 20 other candidates. Octopus calls this a “Discovery Day” which is run on a Thursday morning for 3 and a half hours from 9:30am to (approx) 13:00. Given the fact that the majority of people applying for Octopus are going to already have jobs, this is an unnecessarily long period of time, especially when you make the effort to turn up on the day and realise that you only actually have 30 minutes for a group interview and around 30 minutes for a 1:1 interview if you’re lucky - the rest being useless waffle that can be saved for Day 1 if you actually get the job. In my personal experience, the interviewer was blasting through questions so quickly that it was clear they weren’t actually listening to my answers. I was cut off several times and told to “wrap it up” so they could move on to the next question. Realistically, a good interviewer should be listening to the answers they’re being given and be able to adapt the questions they have to suit the situation, not cut you off when you’re in the middle of answering a question for “time constraints” to then go on and ask you the same question worded differently. For one thing it’s unprofessional, but it’s also very off-putting to the interviewee. Following this assessment day, you then have it dropped on you that you have to complete Maths & English tests. Again, surely this is something that could be part of the initial (pre-interview) checks in the form of a take home task of some sort? You’ve already made people take time off work to sit through nearly 4 hours of a needless interview process to only then tell them they have to do a further two tests? Finally, the next stage after this is to receive a phone call with a final interview before you’re offered the job. We were old during the Discovery Day we’d hear back within the week but it’s nearly 3 weeks later and I’ve heard nothing, despite chasing. I’d be surprised if I was offered the job anyway given by the fact that I was barely given a chance to answer any of the questions I was asked, but this entire process has made me realise I have no interest in working for Octopus anyway. The entire experience has just left me feeling like they’re a disorganised organisation who have no issue with wasting people’s time.