-Sales and Marketing Graduate Scheme, Danone.
£26K.
Fell in love with this salary job. I’d been eyeing it up
since March but had to wait until applications opened in June before I could
get my hands on it. It sounded perfect; a year-long graduate scheme at a global
company, great pay, great ethics, great benefits (free Activia anyone?) with
the opportunity to learn so much in the business world. I was already
envisioning myself in the office….
When the applications opened, I practically wrote a thesis
proclaiming my perfectness for the job and showed my knowledge of Danone to impress
them (by the time I’d finished researching the company I probably knew more
about Danone than Danone knows about Danone) which paid off as I received an
email saying I’d got through to the next stage! Excitement ensued.
Then I found out the next stage was verbal and numerical
reasoning tests.
Fiddlesticks.
Why cruel world why.
I wasn’t expecting tests, though I should have been
considering the amount of stages in job applications you have go through these
days: CV, covering letter, aptitude tests, phone interview, recruitment day,
actual interview, signing away of soul…surely the next stage in the process is
dinner and a movie? I did give them my number after all.
Back to the tests, verbal I can handle, numerical was the
loose string…
I get going on the practice verbal test; it’s not your
standard SAT question like, ‘which word means the same as the target word?’ or ‘which
is the correct spelling?’. It seemed to test whether you can deduce the key
message from a given paragraph and state whether the following statement is
true, false or not applicable. I got 79% on that test, things are looking good, surely
that would be a pass. Now onto the maths part…
I’m not baaaad at maths, I’m just a bit rusty. I can do
my times tables up to 12, what more do you need?? I once managed to get 65% on
a second year statistics exam the morning after a Kings of Leon concert so I’m
thinking I could be in with a chance, nevermind the fact that I miraculously got a
grade A at maths GCSE, which is the proudest moment of my life to date. When
future kiddywinks come along, they’re gonna have to be pretty damn special to
knock that A grade off the number 1 spot for greatest life achievement.
Only
kidding.
Kind of.
And when it comes to the old epitaph writing, future husband
is going to have to battle it out with Mrs. Sharp (GCSE year maths teacher) for
who gets the prized mentioning as the love of my life.
So, I dust off the old calculator ready for the practice
numerical test (40 minutes long mind you, I missed countdown for this dammit)
with a positive attitude that yes, I CAN do this.
I get 24%.
Seems like I can’t do it after all! Reader, it was so
difficult, it wasn’t normal! You don’t need a calculator to solve those
problems- you need a fully staffed, state of the art computer lab
cross-correlating algorithms and code breakers whilst undergoing statistical
analyses.
There were about 30 questions, and every two questions
the ‘story’ of the question changed, complete with a different spreadsheet,
graph or corresponding image and you had to extract the information from the
image, read the question, do the appropriate calculation then pick one of the 5
multiple choice answers in the space of 75 seconds. Nine times out of ten the number I came up with didn’t
match any of the choices given….whoops?
The time pressure made it worse. I like to console myself on
these dark summer nights that if it hadn’t been timed I would've scored higher.
My ego has suffered badly from the experience; it hardly ever comes out of its room,
never eats, and spends its days alternating between crying and haphazardly shouting
out the Fibonacci sequence, usually in the wrong order mind you. However
they were only practice tests, so I got back on my horse and galloped onto GCSE
Bitesize for a good 90 minutes to revise percentages and ratios before doing
the real deal.
As it turns out the real deal verbal test went worse than
the practice however I did do better on the numerical test but I immediately knew that
it still wasn’t enough to pass, which was confirmed by an email later that day.
Followed by another email the day after telling me I hadn’t passed. Gees, kick
me while I’m down why don’t you! I don’t need to be reminded that I failed your
homemade intelligence test, screw you Danone, I don’t need you or your lifetime supply of yoghurty goodness,
because at least I can make 9 letter words on Countdown!*
No, truthfully I wasn’t too bothered at the end of the
day, yes the money would’ve been amazing, but it might come along with a lot of
pressure, and yes the marketing aspect would’ve been perfect, but the slow,
soul destroying reality of admitting I also worked in ‘sales’ would’ve got to
me a few years down the line as I bathed in my golden bathtub looking out onto
the veranda to my golden egg laying hen. I don’t think I have it in me to be
one of those hard selling, shrewd business types and I’m not yet sure if this
is a blessing or a burden (I like to think blessing). A job in sales just makes
me think of those in-your-face types who practically bully you into buying
their product. I hate the hard sell, if someone wants something, they’ll buy it.
If the product is good enough and good value, they won’t need you to sell it to
them, they’ll already be buying it. Every year on The Apprentice when the selling
task turns up I cringe at the tactics and lengths some people will go to sell
something, it seems so immoral!
Speaking of Apprentice, allow me to introduce you to my
future husband, Nick from series 8:
He doesn’t know it yet but we are soulmates.
Anyways, the thing that really made me happy that I
didn’t progress to the next stage was I know I could not have lived with the
fact that I worked for a company whose recruitment email was spelt
‘recrutement@danone’. Seriously.
Seriously. They need to fix that. Painful. My eyes. Maybe they’ve been
focussing too much on the sums and not enough on the spelling ;)
Edit: At this
stage of writing the post I had a lightbulb moment…
Dammit. In a moment of clarity I suddenly had a thought I
better check the olde English-French dictionary for the translation of the word
‘recruitment’ and sure enough recruitment in French is spelt ‘recrutement’
which explains their email (I remembered from my research of the company that they have
their headquarters in France). So technically it’s not an error, which now takes
away the joy I had in not progressing further. But still their email function
is obviously flawed if it goes around telling dejected rejects that they’re
rejected more than once. So much ject to deal with.
Nevermind, in the wise words of Timon and Pumbaa, Hakuna Matata!
You can all thank me later when you catch yourself humming that damn catchy tune, feeling instantly happier.
*small print: this has only happened 4 times. But have it be known I did get the conundrum once too.
