Well, being a recent graduate, I’ve been job hunting for the past couple of months. I originally applied to Atos Origin, which is a large technology consulting company, and got rejected after a few recruitment rounds, which I was a bit disappointed about. I must admit that I let things lapse for a little bit, but eventually I got back on the search. Making good use of cwjobs.co.uk, I found a few more jobs in the Coventry and Birmingham areas and shot off my CV to them. I got a polite rejection from one, and heard nothing from the others for a fortnight. Fed up of waiting, I applied to about ten more jobs, and heard back from two recruitment agencies in the next few days.
Happy that I finally had people interested in me, I soon had two interviews set up. I had my first interview with a technical test (who cares about left outer joins anyway?), and thought it went well; telephoned the recruitment agency and said as much. My second interview, I initially thought went less well, as they were playing the good cop/bad cop roles. I got a phone call later on from that recruitment agency saying that they had been very impressed. The end result was two second interviews. Yay!
I had my second interview from the first company, which I was pretty sure went well, and later on received a job offer from them. The other interview was, unfortunately, scheduled a day before the acceptance deadline of the offer I had been given. So I went along, had a pretty good time meeting people, and having a chat with HR people and a technical lead. I went home feeling a bit conflicted on where I wanted to work. The two companies worked in relatively different areas, but both were places where I could see myself working.
That evening, the decision appeared to be made for me, as I hadn’t heard back from the second company, and I needed to get my acceptance to the first company off in the last postage to make the deadline. I was a bit disappointed not to have received an offer, but still more than happy with the offer that I had.
The spanner in the works appeared a few days later when I received the second offer. It was equal to the one I already had, so I politely rejected it only to be told: “We thought you might say that so they [the company] has given me permission to put you on to their HR department to discuss the offer.” In the end, though, I decided to stay with the offer that I had already accepted, rather than trying to barter the other company up — something that I think would have been a little crass. It is nice to know, though, that if things don’t work out they may still be interested in seeing me. Hopefully I won’t need to find out, though. 