April '24. Initial email response from the recruiter to arrange an interview with the Chief Enterprise Architect. The video call with the Head went well, we seemed to even have things in common, but it was hurried. That was the only person I spoke to or saw throughout the entire process.
It was hard to tell if the hiring manager had any intention of hiring for the recently relisted job, but he did outline their recruitment process since the recruiter hadn't, and was satisfied that I sounded English. To wrap up the brief call, the hiring manager said I would need to complete a technical test, something everyone was expected to complete before proceeding to later stages.
Surely enough I was sent a tech assessment, a PDF with a couple of pages. I was told not to spend more than a few hours on it. By this time it should have been clear that ITV had no intention of hiring for the "vacancy". One that they are still advertising.
This was one of the worst and most poorly laid out (presented) technical tests I have ever since. Shocking in many respects... perhaps deliberately so. You can tell a lot about a company and department by the "assessment" they give candidates. It speaks volumes.
Surely enough, after submitting a (tested) working PySpark job in reply to their email, I was ghosted.
I chased over a week later only to be told given nonsense feedback that evidently wasn't applicable to my job submission (non of the points applied to the python script).
I resubmitted the assessment and solution, explaining there must have been some sort of mistake. Perhaps they could have the decency to look at the solution... to no avail. Ghosted again. No reply from careers@itv either or the hiring manager.
Absolutely sickening and disgraceful. I am not sure what sort of discrimination I suffered, but reprehensible coming from a FTSE 100.