A.S. Watson Group

Interview

I hate to pile on bad reviews, but the whole process was a bit of a waste of time. The people were nice and the actual interviews quite pleasant, BUT... I completely understand what the other negative interview reviews are talking about. They have no respect for your time, the process is slow, unnecessarily long and unorganised and the communication very bad.
Whole process took about a month and a half. After the standard communication with HR, I had a phone interview with a manager, quite standard, went through my CV and asked some questions about my experience. They then arranged a first stage face to face interview, which lasted about an hour, followed by a technical test. The interview was more of a chat, went through my CV again, talked in more detail about my experience. The technical test was ridiculous, had to write some code in a room with pen and paper, I could not believe people still do this!! Not fun trying to write a nested query in a tiny box with a pen!
Anyway, they invited me for a second stage face to face interview, which took three weeks to arrange. Communication with HR was very difficult during that period of time, they would not reply to my emails for a week or more, or they would ask me a question and then disappear for 10 days.
Then, the second stage face to face interview was finally arranged, including a second task, which was a business analyst type of presentation. It lasted one hour. By that time they had forgotten pretty much everything about me, so they asked me a lot of the same questions, went through my CV again, asked about my experience, etc.
Then, 10 days of no communication again, I chased and they said they had decided not to proceed because I had failed the first stage technical test. I didn't even bother to ask why they had wasted my time and called me for a second stage interview.