We want to give you the best chance to show us what you’re capable of, and to relax and enjoy the application process. We hope these pointers will help you know what to expect and be better prepared for the two rounds, with their different formats and emphasis.
If at any stage you’re not clear about anything, please just ask us by emailing recruitment@onpurpose.uk.com
Online assessment
To give you a sense of the sort of projects you could be working on if you join the programme, you’ll be presented with a real business challenge that an Associate has previously worked on. You’ll be asked to respond to questions at different points in the activity, and submitting supporting documents that demonstrate your reasoning.
Although you’re given a week to submit the documents and film clip, we anticipate it being completed in no more than 90 minutes, so don’t go overboard with additional research. You’ll need access to the internet, Windows Office software, or similar, and a web- or mobile phone- camera in order to record yourself. A higher spec camera is not required, provided the sound is clear.
Harriet’s tips for the online challenge
Second round
Is two 30 minute one-to-one personal experience interviews and a 60 minute case interview.
In the personal experience interviews we will ask you to talk about your professional background or extracurricular actives. You should
- Make sure you’ve reviewed how we define the four things we look for
- Have more than one example for each category
- Be prepared to talk about your examples in detail
- Make sure you can talk about what you did in the situation
Gautier’s tips for personal experience interviews
We use a case in this round to assess your problem solving skills. It’s a good idea to bare in mind:
- It requires no prior social enterprise or business knowledge. The case will reflect a project that an Associate might work on at a placement
- It’s a two-way conversation, so you’ll be able to ask clarifying questions as you go along
- There’s never one right answer, instead it’s to understand how you tackle problems and think
- Your comfort with mental arithmetic will be tested, so do practice it if it’s been a while
- We’ll take this chance to look at your ability to pull information together to share meaningful conclusions
We’d encourage you to practice before the case interview. You can see some examples of cases that are similar to what we might use here and here.
Finally, there’s a chance we’ll want to see a little bit more of you so we may want to see how you get on in a group exercise. We’ll let you know if this is the case when we invite you to interview.
Jon’s tips on case interviews
Taster training
To give you more of an idea of what On Purpose is like, you’ll be invited to attend an evening of taster training sessions. These will broadly reflect the kinds of training we provide at On Purpose and will also give you a chance to meet some of the current Associates.
Feedback
At On Purpose we take feedback seriously. We’ll ring you up after the 2nd and 3rd rounds to give you some pointers on how you have done (whether you were successful at the last round or not). If you are keen to have feedback on the 1st round, we can arrange this on a case by case basis as well.
Attending the second round in person
We realise that some of you have to travel large distances to attend interviews, and this can be costly and time consuming. To be sure we’re making the best decisions though, you are required to attend the interviews in person. Skype is not sufficient.