I recently did an assessment day with the deVere group for the Graduate Wealth Advisor role, I hope this will help those who are interested.
The application process was probably the easiest I have done so far.
Online application: just a CV upload and a 5-minute form
Attend the graduate webinar
Multiple choice personality quiz
15-minute telephone interview
3 1/2 hour assessment day (in a Heathrow conference room)
The assessment day is set very well to extract the personalities well suited to a sales role. You don’t even need to do much research about the company because they won’t test you on it.
It was split into 5 parts: introductory presentation, team project, debate, interview, practice call and 30second elevator pitch
Introductory presentation
There were around 15-20 graduates there. We were told to introduce ourselves, grab some water and watch a short presentation where a recruiter told us a bit about the role. He sold some dreams talking about how you if you made 1 deal a week you could potentially earn 200k in the year. They then split us into groups of 4 for the tasks.
Team project
Team project was to come up with any company you want that will make enough money to pay your investor back £20,000.
Debate: The recruiter will give you a topic for the first debate such as best supermarket/crisp/television show/football club etc. Each person will have to say why their ____ is the best. One of you will suggest the topic for the next debate.
Interview
It sounds a lot worse than it is. The recruiter will fire quick questions at you; why deVere, why Finance, what is your chosen location and why. Interview lasted 5 minutes then you are given a very strange quiz, probably testing common sense. Questions like D is to B as F is to …? Personally I think its just to keep you busy while the others have an interview
Practice call
Arguably the most difficult part and the most important for them. They want to see how you sound on the phone selling products. The recruiter gives you a phone and a script and walks out of the room, you call him and try to sound as though you're not reading from a script.
30 second elevator pitch
At the end, all of the graduates form a semicircle. We are given a brief that our boat is sinking and we will need to throw some people off. You are given a random profession (such as ballerina, shopkeeper, candlestick maker, Christmas tree decorator etc) and about 1 minute to prepare a pitch for delivery in front of everybody, saying why they should save you. This part is also very important to them. After that everybody says 2 people they would throw off the boat.
After all of that, the recruiter showed us some photos of the current graduate teams (a lot less people than I expected), he went through each one and said which location they were in but I found it particularly unethical when he showed us which graduates had quit/been fired for the group to laugh at. For example 2 graduates were fired because they had a ‘9-5 attitude’ even though they were on track to earning 70K p/a. I found it threatening, companies have a responsibility to uphold some integrity. If I work for a company, I would appreciate that they didn’t expose me like that.
OFFER?
You are marked out of 10 and if you make it over 7, you pass. They said they can decide within 20 minutes of you leaving the room which grads they will take on. They get back to you fairly quickly which is nice. I got my result the next day. Good idea to collect some numbers from the other graduates so that you know when the successful people have been told.
Anyway if you feel you have the gift of the gab or you have done sales/telesales before, or you can hold a foul-mouthed conversation about football/Formula 1, no doubt you will fit right into their culture. I had already made up my mind about the company before i went to the assessment day but wanted practice for another assessment day coming up. Good Luck ;)
