Update 2023/10/13
Just received an email with an ugly refusal.
Last Tuesday, I participated in Emerson Australia’s assessment day at Swan River Room 2, Ritz-Carlton Perth. It was my first interview for a graduate program, and I was one of about 20 participants. Surprisingly, the HR team mentioned that we were chosen from a pool of over 300 candidates, which I found hard to believe given my initial doubts about the strength of my resume. Nonetheless, I appreciated this opportunity, especially given the challenges I’ve been facing in my job search.
Event composition
In general, the event contains four parts:
- a general introduction from Emerson, with a subsequent warm-up.
- group activity 1: Constructing a chain reaction using various materials.
- group activity 2: engineering case study involving group discussions, assumption-making, proposal generation, questions and oral report.
- select 10 out of 20 to the interview.
Unfortunately, I didn’t make to the final interview stage.
Reviews
Although I did a few researches on the group activities and understand what I need to do to succeed in this assessment, I was not able to act like what I expected to be.
Potential reasons:
- Insufficient sleep due to anxiety, resulting in an attention deficit for details.
- I found it challenging to follow the conversation during the case study because I’m not very familiar with the engineering techniques involved, and I’m not confident in my English listening skills. I believe I need to find a way to practice and improve in these areas.
- Even though I believe I contributed some valuable ideas and shared them with my teammates during the activities, I’m uncertain if the assessors took notice, considering the longer periods of silence on my part.
Anyway, the experience was truly inspiring as I participated in a real assessment centre for the first time and I had the opportunity to connect with several incredible individuals from various universities and educational backgrounds.
Complaints
The assessment process is quite frustrating and annoying; The HR team often tried to be pleasant and polite, but they rarely communicated the number of positions available or their specific selection criteria, leaving candidates in the dark until a merciless rejection. I must admit that there were a few strong candidates who were not only talkative but also highly skilled at effective communication when dealing with tasks. It seemed like they had encountered similar situations before, which was somewhat frustrating for me, as I felt like I was merely used to highlight their abilities. I often wonder who was the first person to employ such a seemingly meaningless method for selecting candidates. Honestly, I don’t know if I had another chance to attend such assessment event, but I don’t wanna attend such event anymore.
