This was the most unprofessional interview I've ever been to. It was supposed to be an assessment day but the man interviewing the group of candidates ended up waffling on for most of the time and then showing us random fragments of TED talks on a projector.
The job ad stated that they wanted 'autonomous and professional trainers' to take on a caseload of student apprentices in primary and secondary schools. The (in my opinion, inexperienced) interviewers did not follow this brief and just wanted to employ people 'like them'. The head of training was not present for the assessment, but the office operations assistant (who was actually her daughter) attended instead. This was obviously a CPD experience for the ops assistant, but a poor choice for recruiting trainers, as she clearly had no idea about skill sets outside of her direct experience.
We were offered a cup of tea from a Costa coffee cup that looked like it had been stolen from the shop and despite being over a lunchtime 12-3pm were not even offered a biscuit. This was when I started to seriously doubt the credentials of Youthforce. If they aren't organised enough to look after potential employees properly, how are they looking after the needs of the young people they are taking government money to train?
I know from local reputation and the experience of friends that this company has had problems in the past with staffing and have lost people from their NVQ assessor and adult youth worker training courses, due to the poor quality of their training and organisation. I was really hoping when I went for this job that they had improved...