I want to start this review by outlining that my experience with Gartner has been by far the worst candidate experience I have ever encountered - in my 10 years experience and 6 years in Recruitment, it now stands as a shining example of what NOT to do when running an interview process. With all the issues and feedback I shared with the team directly, I can still see no changes made to their job adverts or job descriptions. This says to me that they do not care about their candidate experience and therefore their employees, if they will not take on board advice when faced with an error.
The interview process was long winded - over the course of 4-5 weeks, I spoke with 9 different stakeholders as part of the TA team across 3 interview stages. Seemed like the volume of work could have been completed with a more streamlined process and more care taken to build rapport as part of a candidate experience.
The first stage was a standard screening call over the phone covering experience, competency, salary expectations and LOCATION (I'll bold this because it comes up again).
2nd stage was a Teams meeting with a member of the recruiting team, covering again competencies, expectations and LOCATION for the first half of the call but followed by values based questions (they encourage throughout the process to answer using the STAR method)
As part of the 3rd stage, this was again a video interview stage split into 2 calls with 2 members of the team in Spain and 2 members in the UK - similar call to the last video interview covering competency, expectations and LOCATION - finished with STAR based competency questions.
At the end of this process, I was offered a position with Gartner to which I verbally accepted and submitted my details for contract - upon sending these details, I was met with radio silence for a week. I then received a call from a member of the team to make me aware that my offer was being recalled due to my location being "outside of their location strategy" - This strategy being a maximum of 60 minutes to the office, my location is a 75 minute commute...To this, I was understandably furious as I have at no stage in the process been secretive of my location or my commitment to being based in the office when required (despite at no stage in the interview process being required in the office) - they admitted that this was an oversight of their team and should have been spotted at an earlier stage in the process, even though it was covered and discussed at every stage of the process...
After challenging this decision to the extent that it was painful to hear the excuse "it's out of our hands", "we can't change the policy", "all we can say is sorry" etc. I realised that the business does not care about people and only about numbers, a people first business would overlook a policy such as this with a candidate that was motivated to work, met all areas of the role criteria and was committed to attend the office over the requested number of days - Gartner is not a people first company.
It is within every candidates right to determine what for them is a reasonable commute and not for the business to make that decision for them.