- I applied for a 7 month contract role - I had 3 interviews (HR call, Director phone call, video call) and 2 tasks total (online assessment and a 90 minute task), the process was arduous and convoluted for a 7 month contract role. - I was sent the online assessment first, got an automated rejection email, then a day later I got an email from a person inviting me to interview.. so that was quite confusing. - Then I was given a task to do, for which I received no feedback but was put through to the next round so assuming it was sufficient. - The final video interview was awful, the questions were from the 1980s, interrogation style interview, one of the interviewers clearly didn't want to be there, totally stonefaced and unfriendly, they pushed me to name drop every journalist I knew, which felt incredibly distasteful. I am someone with quite a few contacts, some high profile, and I don't want to damage my personal relationships by divulging this info. I was always taught not to name drop, be humble and respect privacy. - The worst was yet to come.. the very next day I missed a call from Barclays HR. I called back 3 times (once every hour or so) and they didn't pick up. I finally received a call back, accepted the call and lifted the phone to my ear and heard a woman laughing "I've just got to reject someone hahaha", I said "umm hello?" and the HR woman hung up on me. Half an hour later she called me back, embarassed but didn't actually apologise. She gave me half baked feedback that I hadn't name dropped enough journalists and the interviewers weren't confident in my ability to deliver campaigns tied to business objectives. I'm not sure I buy this as I have been working on both national and international campaigns tied to business objectives for 4 different companies for the last decade of my working life and I gave examples as such. - I got the feeling they didn't like my style, I gave examples of modern campaigns run by cool new food companies, I wrote about the arts sector in my task, I just got the feeling I wasn't their standard pale, male, stale middle class candidate and they didn't actually want someone creative despite this being pushed in the job description. Regardless of this, their conduct was extremely chaotic and unprofessional throughout and I'd really expect more from such a large organisation that should really have this process smoothed out. Their HR teams really need to work on professionalism and emotional intelligence.

An interview with HR, a values test online that was a lot of questions about what you'd do in a situation, a written task that was timed - this was to produce a campaign plan, channels plan, social media post copy, spokesperson quote and a press release - and then a final interview.