Cady Siregar is a 23-year-old freelance writer from Queens, New York City. In 2014, she needed a part-time job to supplement her studies at university. She decided to apply to one of New York’s largest independent bookshops for a minimum-wage role on the shopfloor. As she was studying literature, Siregar thought she would be a good fit. What she wasn’t prepared for were the hoops she would need to jump through to get the job.

“They made me do a really complicated quiz of matching authors to their own pieces of work and I had to score a certain number to get to the next round,” Siregar says. “It was like A-level English.” She then had to recite her favourite passage from a novel, unprepared and on the spot. “It was really pretentious and unnecessary. The job was really basic and standard – it just involved working a till, shelving, and taking stock.”

These kinds of elaborate interviews for low-paid retail jobs are proliferating in the UK too. As a freelance journalist, I have had to supplement my income with part-time jobs, and the first place I looked was in the retail sector. Recently I noticed that the application process had changed dramatically from when I worked in a shop a decade earlier. Applying to some companies can take hours, a far cry from the days when a brief chat with the hiring manager on the shopfloor was all it took to get your foot in the door. After slogging through multiple job applications late last year, I managed to secure an interview with Asda, and was invited to one of their group assessment sessions – what they call “Asda Magic”. Every potential Asda recruit has to go through an Asda Magic session, which the supermarket introduced in the mid-to-late 90s.

I managed to secure an interview with Asda, and was invited to one of their group assessment sessions – what they call ‘Asda Magic’



I didn’t exactly prepare for Asda Magic. I mistakenly expected the interview would unfold in much the same way that my interview with Sainsbury’s had 10 years earlier, which involved a brief chat about my work experience and a few other generic questions. Then I heard other candidates in the waiting room discuss what they had learned about the interview process from Glassdoor, a website where employees and former employees anonymously review companies, including the interview process. One candidate warned me that we might have to build objects out of straws while being observed, and come up with a poem or a play to sell a product back to the assessors. I felt the panic rising in my chest, made an excuse to leave the room and didn’t return.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rows of dolls at Hamleys ... ‘We had to introduce ourselves in a funny way, or sing it,’ says one sales assistant of the selection process. Photograph: Frank Baron/The Guardian

Dominic James, 23, a shop assistant living in Islington, north London says that what had panicked me at Asda was similar to the hoops he had to jump through during his three-day interview ordeal at Hamleys toy shop in the West End of London. James says the first day was standard fare, but on the second day things got weird: “You’re put into this room with a bunch of people who you’ve never met before; doing various exercises for the whole day. The first thing they asked us to do was introduce ourselves in a funny way, or sing it.” James was then asked to go on to the shopfloor and retrieve a product to sell back to the group. He selected a bouncy ball. “We were then put into two separate groups and asked to make up a play to sell the product. Then we had to act it out to the whole group.” James says he coped quite well in the interview as drama lessons at school had prepared him for all kinds of strange exercises, but others in the group were visibly nervous.

Louise (not her real name) had a similar experience at a group interview at an Odeon cinema in Brighton. Louise says that when she turned up for the interview there were around 40 other people there: “We had to go into an empty screening room, get on the stage, in front of a massive screen, and talk about our most embarrassing moment ever,” Louise says. “Then we had to do a group task about what we would do if we were stuck on a desert island.” Louise then describes an “X Factor-style” cut where half the candidates were sent home – some of whom, she says, looked gutted: “Then we had a one-on-one interview and a task of filling in some paper quizzes.”

So why are some retailers using these techniques? According to Clare Kemsley, director of recruitment firm Hays Retail, employers “choose to turn the usual interview process on its head, by asking candidates to be creative when demonstrating their selling skills or presenting, in order to spot who stands out from the crowd”. Ruth Jacobs, managing director of Randstad Business Support, another large recruiter, echoes this. “To compete with online stores, retailers are increasingly looking for innovative ways to deliver an engaging, theatrical and memorable retail experience. This is being reflected in a more creative hiring process, especially at assessment stage level.”

After my experience at Asda, I tried to prepare for any wacky hoops I may have to jump through at future job interviews. I managed to land a seasonal job at HMV during the run-up to Christmas. The interview process was not as elaborate as some on the high street, but it took over an hour, involved public speaking and selling the store’s points card back to the group.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Odeon cinema chain uses a recruitment process called ‘Fizz and Pop’. Photograph: David Sillitoe/The Guardian

David Smith, an HR professional and former executive board director at Asda, played a key role in transforming the supermarket’s recruitment process in the 90s. “You can’t determine what personality type someone is in an interview because most people have been tutored on the right things to say and it doesn’t really tell you anything about them at all,” he says. Smith argues that, in the retail sector, the people who thrive are extroverts and the exercises that instilled so much terror in me are designed to tease out those personalities. I ask Smith if Asda Magic unfairly excludes candidates who struggle at the tasks involved in Asda Magic, but are more than capable of stacking a shelf or serving customers at a checkout. “It’s not just about being capable of stacking a shelf,” he says. “I think when you’re in a shop people come and talk to you and ask you about products they can’t find, so even the people who are stacking the shelves need to be good with people.”

What about people who are not extroverts? “Maybe the shy people ought to work in IT jobs,” he says. “If you’re working on a checkout and you’re spending four hours with customers most of the time, I think you need to be really good with people.”

Siregar, who now lives in south London, argues that to land a role at the New York bookshop you would need a degree. “Some people don’t have that kind of luxury or qualifications, and shouldn’t have to for such a basic job.” Neil Jameson, executive director at Citizens UK agrees. “All employers, including retailers, should treat candidates with dignity and respect,” he says. “That starts by offering jobs that pay a real living wage, not by making employees jump through absurd hoops.”

Kemsley stresses that candidates shouldn’t be put off by rumours of “slightly unusual interview processes”, adding that “companies who choose to make their interview process extremely different from the norm are still in the minority”.

But for some candidates, failing at the kind of selection process Louise went though to get a cinema job could be a serious blow to their confidence. “A lot of people looked shocked that they would have to do some public speaking during the interview, something the job didn’t require at all,” Louise says. “There was one guy there with a stutter, and you could tell he found it really hard. He was cut off halfway through.”

A spokesperson from the cinema chain tells me it doesn’t recognise the details of Louise’s interview, while acknowledging that it does use a recruitment process called “Fizz and Pop” to find its cinema hosts. “We use a series of ice-breakers, presentations and case studies which bring out the best in our candidates, and help us find those most likely to succeed at Odeon.” I ask for more details on how “Fizz and Pop” differs from the interview process Louise describes; they don’t respond.

Louise says her job required only basic organisational and people skills. “It’s crazy that it needs you to jump through hoops that even a professional job sometimes doesn’t require,” she says. “I was lucky to be quite experienced and confident. I had extra confidence from thinking the whole thing was a joke and refusing to take it seriously, which perversely they seemed to like. But how can people with no experience or low confidence ever get on the lowest rung of the job ladder if it’s raised so high?”

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