Bank of Ireland

Application

I applied online. The process took 8 weeks. I interviewed at Bank of Ireland (London, England) in December 2019.

Interview

The BOI Grad Roles start with an online application followed by the online tests. If you passed these you will be progressed to video interview. Between application and video interview was about 3 wks (Oct/Nov). The video was pretty basic and easy to be honest.. I can't remember exactly but they were along the lines of "why BOI", "why you" and "why this stream". The main thing most organisations look for at this level is if you are a nice, normal, socially-competent person; so be likeable.
If you are successful at this stage you will be invited to the assessment centre in London.

The assessment centre in London started at 8:30 until 12:30 (!! they tell you it's 3 hours but that's highly unrealistic!! - take heed if you are booking flights on the basis of it lasting 3 hours). I know there was a second group taking place at 12:30 ; each with 8 candidates. Therefore there are 16 people competing for 3 places.

We were taken immediately into the group assessment - 43 minutes
 Candidate to panel ratio of 2:1 (2 candidates watched by each panel member). The task was to present on company updates;
The company in question was going through updates and each member of the group was assigned a particular department to make recommendations about. We were given information booklets which must be read in 8 minutes, outlining the possible roads for each department to take in their investment. You needed solid reasoning to fight for a portion of the budget to invest in your cause and collaborate as a group to present your findings at the end. No technical knowledge required at all apart from the use of very basic calculator skills to make sure the budget isn't exhausted with all the recommendations. My group were a dream to work with and everyone got along extremely well. Such a nice change from other assessment centres where people are very friendly in the waiting room and become absolute beasts throwing you under the bus in the assessment. Don't be that person. Nobody will like you enough to give you a job if you act that way. Remember group assessments are generally to test your skills in teamwork not to test your individual skills against the rest of your team.

Secondly (with only a few minutes break for me - but some people ended up waiting around for up to 2 hours to be called ) we were taken to the competency based interviews.
These interviews last 45 minutes and are with 2 interviewers.
The first question was "Walk me through your CV" and followed by one competency based question for each of the 7 tested competencies which they will tell you about in your invitation email. These competency based questions come in the order of the way the core competencies are always listed to you; so very predictable. By the time you have finished all these competency questions your allocated interview time will be up so make sure you capitalise on the opportunity to make your CV come to life in the first question of "walk me through..." - you won't get another chance to talk about whatever you want. I felt very rushed as we ran over time and people kept popping their heads in to get us out o the room but they wont end your interview until you've finished the 7 competency questions so relax.

Lastly was the individual "fact-finding" case study which lasts strictly 25 minutes.
Again this was 1:2 (1 interviewee against 2 interviewers). You are briefly briefed before having 5 minutes to review a set of documents relating to a tech company signing an exclusive trade agreement with a multinational. Followed by this you have 5 minutes to ask the CEO of the other company whatever questions you might have when making your decision to form this contractual agreement or not (taking into consideration benefits, risks and opportunities of the agreement. Finally you will have 10 minutes to prepare a presentation and 5 minutes to present your recommendations to your own company's CEO as to whether or not you recommend forming the agreement.

Final note;
The organisation was abysmal at best. Loads of mistakes in the email details and then fixing the mistakes with more mistakes. Also they only tell you the times for the assessment centre a day or two before so if you are living overseas then good luck.

I felt pretty confident leaving the interview but knowing now that there are only 3 spots and that 16 of us interviewed; it's hard to be hopeful. Everyone else there was quite impressive, came from very competitive universities and had intimidating work experience (HSBC, JP Morgan etc.)