Sunday, 19 June 2011

Recruiting the Next PR Assistant Placement Student - March

Being part of the recruitment process was amazing but so bizarre - helping to pick the next 'you' is hard! I sat in on the telephone interviews and then got to meet the successful candidates at the next stage in the face-to-face interviews and it was very surreal, as I'd been in exactly the same position almost a year before!

The interview process for a position at Panasonic is quite a lengthy one, but it's worth it when you consider how many hundreds of people apply for each role - it's so important to hire the right person with not only all of the right skills, but also the enthusiasm and drive to work for the company! The first stage is the telephone interview, then a face-to-face interview where you have the opportunity to meet the team you might soon be working with. After this comes what is called the 'Assessment Centre Day', where you are informally interviewed with the other final potential candidates in individual assessments and also in group tasks. I confess that it was my birthday on the Assessment Centre Day for my role, so I was otherwise engaged (with family time and eating cake...), so the team had to fill me in on who had got the job when I came back! When I'd met all of the candidates at the previous interview stages, though, I felt so nervous for them - you could tell they all really wanted to be there and were giddy that they might soon have a job at Panasonic! I completely understood what it was like to be in their shoes and was rooting for all of them.

When we were narrowing the applications of the possible candidates for the interview process, we decided to only consider students doing a purely PR degree. This was a little weird for me, as I'm on the MAC course at uni (this is Marketing, Advertising and Communications, where PR only plays a partial role in my degree). There were some outstanding applications from students on courses like mine and at first I was, in truth, quite gutted that we didn't get to properly consider them (if you think it may be you I'm talking about, WELL DONE for your awesome application and I bet you were snapped up sharpish elsewhere!)

In the end though, I did see where my team were coming from and we picked an absolute corker for the role: Jenny! She's very excited to start her job at Panasonic and is going to have an absolutely incredible year! We're all super happy to have her on the team as well, lovely lady! x

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