Dear friendly and wise Mumsnetters,
Help me feel better after a really tough professional assessment centre today.
Going for a management job that I'm extremely well qualified for but have to jump through this hoop. I was actually looking forward to it. Spent hours practicing but still feel like I ballsed it up!
It was an online assessment centre, individual not group. All done on their online platform, started badly with a big technical hitch on my end. Not my fault, was an unavoidable work laptop configuration issue and no way to know in advance. But threw me off a bit and meant we were running over time from the start. Whole thing lasted 4 and a half hours with 5 mins break.
Competency interview went well but the business case exercise was brutal. 40 mins to read 9 emails, reams of background info and five complex tables of figures, prepare the analysis and draft the recommendations in powerpoint. I guess I was expecting to have longer to prepare. The "downloadable" presentation template didn't work and I had to call their support person. But no extra time allowed. Fair enough. Assessment lady wasn't native English speaker and clearly had an issue understanding me. Fair enough. I thought I did a decent analysis in the time, but she only gave me negative feedback.
Then it was an employee dialogue role play exercise, which I thought I managed well, kept calm, ticked all the boxes that I was supposed to cover. But assessment lady gave more negative feedback. Wrap up session was quite positive but my overriding feeling is that I just didn't show my best side. Which is really annoying as I know the role I'm interviewing for and am pretty sure it's right within my sphere of competence.
Feel so deflated, can't really complain about "mitigating circumstances" but I'm worried that things outside my control like the tech issues and the non-native assessor struggling to understand me are going to count against me.
Any words of wisdom while I wait to find out whether I did indeed screw this up and am out of the running?