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      Cognita

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      Finance Business Analyst Interview

      Feb 29, 2020
      Anonymous interview candidate
      Milton Keynes, England
      No offer
      Negative experience
      Easy interview

      Application

      I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Cognita (Milton Keynes, England) in Dec 2019

      Interview

      The process was one face to face interview after a call from a recruitment agency for a Finance Business Analyst role. The interviewer was friendly enough (as were the reception staff) and did explain the job in detail which was good, but I wasn't given a chance to talk and the only two questions she asked seemed so irrelevant and not enough to judge if someone would be right for the role. Instead of asking about my experience of implementing ERP systems, probing my technical skills or even asking for some examples of how I've got the best out of a system for clients or turned failing accounting departments around, she asked: Do you used PowerPoint a lot? Do you keep up to date with financial regulations? (and quoted a very specific example). To the first question, if someone was an expert at PowerPoint but knew nothing about ERP systems and financial processes - would they get the job? It's PowerPoint, it's not rocket science and it would be such a minor part of the job to put a few slides together. Surely understanding a complex ERP system and accounting processes would be the main thing in this role. This is something I would expect you to ask an admin assistant straight from school. Yes I can use it, but seriously, was it worth asking - someone could learn that part of the job quickly enough if needs be. To the second question, yes as part of my membership of an accounting body I do keep up to date, but again, reading the latest bulletin about a new 'best practice' is hardly going to be a major obstacle or something that an average person would find challenging. Again, I feel that there are a lot of things far more major to the role and that you may as well ask whether I can read or not. Overall she talked for 55 out of the 60 minutes, even going into her own career aspirations and history. I did attempt to offer examples of things I'd done that relate to what she was saying about the role (without outright interrupting her of course) as this appeared to be the only way I could have any involvement in the interview, but she seemed to want to finish her speech about the company and not have interaction. I felt that I might as well have not been there (a phone interview would have sufficed) and that she didn't really know what she wanted from someone in this role. To back up this claim I would point out that she also said there were new senior finance people coming in and that everything was liable to change in the future (always a red flag at an interview), so it probably wasn't her fault that she copped out on the questions. The agency that lined this up ignored me afterwards and acted very unprofessionally. I'm fine if they don't want me for the job, but some feedback would be nice. To be fair to the agency I'm not sure that there would have been anything this woman knew about me at all in order to feed back to them due to her interview style.

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      Do you use PowerPoint?
      1 Answer
      2