When I had my regular catch up with Emma at Sky she mentioned they are right in the middle of their annual graduate recruitment programme.
All the online applications have been received and are now being processed. Sky do all of their graduate selection in-house so it’s a really busy time with all hands to the decks.
They have had a few thousand online applications to screen of which circa 50% have been rejected at the first stage – Sky use a points based system around subject of degree, level of degree, university extracurricular achievements plus competency based essay questions to make the scoring as balanced and fair as possible – it also includes lack of effort in completing the form, bad spelling/ grammar and obvious plagiarism!
Now they are at telephone interview stage (there will probably be a few hundred people telephoned interviewed). This takes about 15 to 20 minutes per candidate and then the successful candidates are put forward to complete online SHL verbal and numerical aptitude tests.
The final stage is a one day assessment centre (where they are re-tested on SHL to ensure it was them who completed the first test!!). The assessment centres include a group exercise, interviews and other activities.
One of the interesting things they have seen is that some of the more highly qualified candidates (i.e. those from a top tier University or those with a 1st) have not made the same amount of effort as those with lesser qualifications at the initial application stage. Thus mistakenly assuming that their qualifications speak for themselves – this is not the case and they have subsequently failed the screening process. After the assessment centres in Jan and Feb it’s a brief respite for the Sky recruitment team before they are then into the planning of the autumn attraction campaign
Next week Emma is off to the RAD awards (Sky have been nominated for a couple) so hopefully we’ll have some update on the activities taking place there…. if Emma can remember anything after what is bound to be a “sociable” night!
