First of all, they're called Ivyuan now, not Taurus. The entire interview process took about a week, it was more professional than other education consulting companies. The people were friendly and reply very fast. The problem I have was the second round interview, specifically their skills analysis part. You are given five brainstorming ideas for potential personal statements and a draft of a personal statement. Then you are given 45 min. to "guide" the student down the right path and correct technical stuff like grammar. The problem? 45 min. is not a lot of time to do anything.
First of all, you have to realize that these essays are written by Chinese students whose English is not very good. Just the essay itself, with its myriad of grammatical errors and poor sentence structures, would require at least half an hour to study and edit. Yet Ivyuan expects you to give some deep advice about essay content within some 20 minutes. Then there is the brainstorming, you have to expand on the idea and guide it. Again, there is little time to study them and give meaningful comment. The interviewer's excuse was that sometimes this was normal, which I find highly unbelievable because if 45 min. was all a consultant had to correct papers, then not a lot would be done. Meaningful comments, quality work, takes time.
The interviewer also skipped an entire section he listed in the interview e-mail. How do you intend on gauging an applicant's strength if you skip a part of the test?
Bottom line: give applicants at least an hour to do the essay and the brainstorming. You expect so much from us while giving us so little time. And also, please go through with the interview. Don't skip anything.
