If you’re thinking of hiring new blood in your Finance department before year-end, it’s OK to take a non-traditional approach to the interview process. But it looks like this hiring manager went a bit too far.
According to various reports, jobseekers at Currys, a British electronics retailer, were required to dance as part of the interview process for a sales assistant position.
The position required sales assistants to advise customers on some of the latest tech gadgets being offered. And apparently the hiring manager thought the best way to find out how candidates would fare in this role was by getting them to dance to a Daft Punk song.
Turns out the applicants were less-than-thrilled with the process, and before long, the story went viral.
Alan Bacon, one of the jobseekers, told BBC Radio 4’s PM that he felt, “degraded, humiliated, mostly disappointed,” by the experience. But Bacon went through with it because “I really needed the job so I thought I’m going to get this over with.”
Bacon added that “There was an older gentleman there who was telling us just before the interview that he was made redundant from his last job and recently had a child so he was pretty desperate for this job, and (we were) watching him having to dance to rap music.”
Didn’t follow recruitment processes
Not only was this humiliating for the jobseekers, it was also something that went against the company’s corporate recruiting process.
And corporate wasn’t too thrilled about a Currys’ hiring manager who went rogue during the interview process.
A spokeswoman for the owners of Currys, Dixons Retail, issued the following statement (which included an apology and an offer for another interview):
“We are extremely disappointed that one of the management team at the store in question did not follow our official recruitment processes on this specific occasion — formal processes that ensure we attract, inspire and retain the right sort of people. We are investigating the store member who held the recruitment session. We are extremely sorry to those interviewees impacted; all are being asked to attend another interview where they will be given a proper opportunity to demonstrate how they can contribute to our business.”