Honestly the recruitment process for John Lewis and Waitrose is surprisingly terrible.
It took 3.5 months to get a part time job with this company.
I applied for this role to afford some flexibility and take time to consider my options after redundancy after Christmas 2017, which was very hard, for many reasons.
I applied online to Waitrose in early January 2018 and got through their initial online tests.
I was invited to interview, some 8 weeks later, at the end of February 2018.
The interview itself went well, when it finally came around, and was one to one with the Assistant Team Manager, who herself was very pleasant - it ended up being 1.5 hours in a messy staff room by the staff coat rack.
I was quite over prepared as I had nearly 2 months to do interview practice, hardly any of the questions I researched came up.
I was then invited to a driving assessment in March, three weeks after interview.
This assessment involved going out during rush hour and the school run in a delivery van practising manoeuvres like reversing through gates, finding difficult addresses and driver courtesy/safety on the road. This assessment was 2hours.
Following this, there was no communication from the branch, from their resourcing centre or online, I had to phone daily to ask for updates, where they passed me on to each other. I waited another 2 weeks.
I received an email then saying John Lewis required a full background check from me, where four documents needed uploading, for full verification, which could take up to 14 working days. Bear in mind we were now in to Easter, so “working days” did not include Good Friday or Easter Monday so my background checks, by this external security company, took nearly 3.5 weeks.
I then had a further week to wait while their resourcing centre and branch failed to communicate with each other properly and delayed my start date, as it was explained that the person looking after my application had gone on long term sick leave.
This branch is also going through a refit, so their phones are frequently down, so often completely uncontactable by phone for several days on end.
I clung on with all my might not to give up, and I didn’t.
You will need a heck of a lot of patience, perseverance and alternative money resources if you want to keep going with this,
I was offered the job last week and started very recently, but the hours I applied for are so far not those given.