When i arrived there were many people. People flew in from America, Italy, France, Switzerland. People who have years of experience and people who have none. There was a lot of waiting involved in the day. when you are waiting, do your best to interact with others! it is important,You do get monitored. I got called for my a role play, then group assessment.
In the role play, they might ask you to read information from a boxed text on the role play scenario outline. It is very simple. then you need to retain AS MUCH INFORMATION AS POSSIBLE from the outline because they are only going to give you 2 minutes to look at it. Read through the scenario without stopping first, then go over it again, and again until 2 minutes has passed. They want to test your short term memory (they are looking to see how well you interact with customers. Therefore you should smile, nod, and say your sorry that the customer is experiencing a difficult time. Explain how useful their customer feedback would be to the company. They also want to see whether you can stick to company policy)
In the group assessment, it seriously does not matter what the situation is. But for me, we had to negotiate a budget. They want to see how you work in a team. Not who has the smartest and loudest mouth, and who tries to be leader. In my group as soon as the 20/25 minute timer began, people were rushing to speak, to get the first word in. It was slightly pressurizing for me at first, but then I realized that it was actually a good thing in my favor because the team was working towards the goal and all I had to do was have some input. But know this, If you find yourself in this situation, wait for a few minutes. AND THEN SPEAK in a CLEAR, CONFIDENT AND NATURAL TONE it has much more impact than trying to be the first to speak. If there is a bossy person, let them be the bossy one. It doesn't work in their own favor all the time. It certainly didn't work in the person in my group's favor. I found myself experiencing heavy brain fog whilst we were trying to work out the budget so what I ended up doing was asking for further confirmation on what we agreed on. Write on the lined paper they provide you to show your engaging in the activity. The assessors also keep the paper at the end. I kept on losing track on what was agreed on so I ended up scooping closer to someone in the group and asked if its okay if I copied from her. Asking people what they have on their piece of paper and if there were any other alternatives to the budget we could make. I was also asking for their names if i wanted to address them/ using their names when i addressed them. I laughed and smiled a lot, nodded and said "yeah, that's a good point" " I agreed with what...... said earlier" " what about ____ group of people" you don't have to be the person who contributes the most or tries to be the smartest, just work with everyone. To be honest, I was so tired from not sleeping the night before, and the long process the day was that I was happy to let other people run the show but still be bubbly and cheerful whilst saying my input. There were 4 assessors sitting and watching us, I barely noticed them.
Following the group assessment, more waiting. Then the assessors walked in for the moment of truth we had all been waiting for, who was going home and who was going to stay. I watched desperately as my fellow applicants names were called to stand up whilst I remained seated. Then they were then taken to another room. After this another assessor began reading out names, my name and a few others was called and i was taken to another room. where we were told we were successful and would be continuing to the interview.