To be fair to Shipley Estates they have sourced this out to a recruitment agency, but they need to rethink that strategy.. The company dealing with this are an agency called Landers Recruitment from the hot bed of recruitment in Bolton. Things started off well enough with submitting a CV for what looked like an interesting role via the web and I was contacted soon after by a friendly consultant who said they would like to invite me to an interview. Sounded good and the email confirmation came through, but I thought it was odd that nobody was going to be present from Shipley Estates, which I queried, but was assured the person present had a great relationship with Shipley Estates and effectively was their man on the ground. So the interview day came around and it was held at a hotel near Coventry.. When I got there I was a bit shocked to see about 10 other candidates waiting...This was effectively a group interview and a filling out application forms session for their agency. An old boy from Landers was there he seemed friendly enough, but I think he must have come in a time machine as it became evident he was stuck in a age of recruitment from a time gone by... We all went into the interview room and did the standard formal introductions round the table, which included the obligatory interesting fact about yourself. We then played through the old school style group interview session handbook including, being handed a card with a question, turning it over and answering the question to the group, a group discussion on technology in the work place (Yawn).. All whilst the old gent from Landers looked on diligently making notes I guess if we were saying keywords or had spoken at certain points. A low point was when he passed round a red bag and asked us to pull out an object and describe it to the room, these included pritsticks and bulldog clips etc.. Once he had his fun he went through some slides on power point which weren't too bad about Shipley Estates, but he still somehow managed to choose a font and colour scheme from another era for these too. Things were brought to a conclusion and we were all sent outside to enjoy the free tea and each of us had to go back in and have a brief interview that lasted about 15 mins. In the meantime the old Landers gent had handed us a Maths and English quiz to do, which bless him he probably didn't realise we all have smart phones and could do the sums on them if we got stuck.. I was eventually called in and by this time I was past caring, he asked me a few standard questions then bizarrely at the end asked me which other candidate would suit the job... He wrapped things up and advised me to call for feedback after 11am the next day.. I never bothered to be honest. At least there were free drinks and it was actually more interesting as a type of job club talking to the other candidates while waiting about what they have been applying for and what were good companies etc, so was not a total waste of a morning In future Shipley Estates might want to send someone along to further interviews or even try another agency,