Hi Rave. No, don't think you are having a go at me although leading your second sentence with the word "but" suggests that you felt a need to provide some justification as to what I might have implied. I was not questioning your experience or suitability at all. I became a LOROL driver a few years back so I talk with experience of being successful at a manager interview and as a qualified driver. That said, I am sure other candidates have been successful adopting a different approach to me.
Thanks for this very measured and reasonable response to my rather aggressive post last night! Must admit I'd had a few when I posted, and if I'm honest falling at the very last hurdle in the application process has probably wounded me more than I've so far been prepared to admit, even to myself!
There's still a possibility that they just didn't like the cut of my jib, but I guess I should really be facing up to the fact that the most likely explanation for why I failed is that I just wasn't good enough on the day
. It hurts because, without wanting to sound like too much of an arrogant **** on this thread (
) , I am a capable person with a proven record of delivering in a similar job. I was genuinely worried that I might not pass the psychometric tests- I was never worried that I didn't have the skills, experience and aptitude to be a good train driver (and I'm still not). For whatever reason I failed to convince the interviewer of that on the day.
As you're a successful candidate then I guess other readers of this thread can form their own conclusions as to whose advice to follow!
I was very specifically referring to communication and in particular to the idea that to "keep talking" might be the best thing. In my opinion it is not - given the critical need to communicate effectively and concisely. Of course if you feel you haven't addressed a question fully then there is a need to expand or even at the end of the interview to acknowledge that and refer back with a better answer. The danger of keeping talking is if that talk lacks substance or becomes a ramble. You clearly have a wealth of experience to impart and it can then become really easy to keep going and the salient point (ie the answer to the question!) gets lost.
I'm assuming here that you're not one of the people who conducted my interview, here in an undercover capacity
, and that you're just here providing (genuinely good and useful) general advice. What I'm getting at is that my next sentence could be taken the wrong way, so please don't take it as me being argumentative!
I'm pretty certain that I didn't ramble, and I'm concise and clear when communicating verbally (writing not so much...). So I'm strongly leaning towards the explanation that the examples I gave in response to the questions weren't up to scratch, rather than that I didn't put them across clearly.
If you think you may have come across as arrogant (your words not mine) then I would suggest that you possibly did talk too much. If you are on the right lines but need a bit more then generally speaking they will ask a supplementary question.
With one exception, they didn't, which is why I walked out with the impression that it had gone well. The interview lasted no more than 30 minutes. The reason that I'm perplexed and upset by the experience is that, as I say, I genuinely think I'm capable of being an excellent train driver, and LOROL went to the presumably not inconsiderable expense of putting me through two sessions of psychometric testing, only to reject me on the basis of an interview where I apparently failed to put across my capabilities properly- I'm surprised that they didn't try and tease a bit more out of me.
Since I emphatically don't want to burn any bridges with LOROL I will say here that I am still extremely grateful to them for taking me as far as they did, that their recruitment staff are impressively nice and efficient, and that everything I saw made me think that they're a great operator and presumably a great employer. Hence all the more anguish when they didn't take me on
.
I do wish you well in future. At least you passed all the tests to hopefully take forward to another TOC.
Cheers, and I'll say again that I'm grateful for your helpful posts. As I said in the other thread I got a letter from DBS yesterday inviting me to take the tests in March. I'll be ringing them in the new year to see if the scores I got with LOROL are good enough to get me straight to interview- touch wood! Otherwise I've got to decide whether I want an overnight trip to Doncaster to take a set of tests I've already passed, and which you only get to fail once in your life...
Pretty much same career as me but I jumped ship to TFL after my controller days to do revenue.
Ooof Revenue? I must say that that is one job I've never fancied in the slightest. To be honest I really enjoyed driving buses, and would probably have been reasonably happy to do it for the rest of my life, had it not been for the fare dodgers. I dislike having confrontations, but I could never let fare dodging attempts slide, so I was constantly having arguments and got assaulted a couple of times for my trouble- nothing too serious, but I figured I was best off out of it before someone knifed me or I got properly beaten up!