Selection process
This page gives an overview of the main stages of our selection process. The main stages are:
- 1: Assessment of your capability to work for us via your application, CV or both
- 2: Completion of an on line verbal reasoning ability test
- 3: Attendance at a Recruitment Day with other candidates in Newcastle
Stage 1: Your Application
At our application/CV Screening stage, we need to make an initial assessment of your application against the essential/desirable criteria and MFA/MMO's capability profile. This is our starting point for everyone who wants to come and work with us in Newcastle, so you'll need to tell us how well you match our capability profile by giving clear and succinct examples.
Before you do this, please check the competencies for the job level you are applying for first. This will give you some insights about the kinds of behaviours which are important at each job level and which you need to reflect in your application.
What you tell us at this stage will determine if we invite you to the next stage in our recruitment process. So we suggest you draft your responses in Word first and keep your responses to 400 or words or less for each response requested in the application form. When you are happy with what you have written, you can cut and paste your responses into the relevant sections of the on-line application - you can save and return to this as often as you like. Candidates who are asked to submit CVs for professional screening will also be asked to complete an application form prior to attending a Recruitment Day.
After putting the finishing touches to your application and submitting it to us online, you will then be invited to complete a short, verbal reasonoing test. We will get back to you within a week or so to let you know if you have been successful and invite you to one of our Recruitment Days. Please note we are unable to give you personalised feedback at this stage of recruitment due to the high number of applications we receive.
Stage 2: On-line ability test
Your ability to work effectively with words and numbers is central to everything we do in MFA/MMO. Many of our jobs don't require high-flying masters degrees but we do need to make sure everyone can work with basic English language. So we ask everyone to complete a short, on-line test. As this is an unsupervised test, we als repeat testing during our Recruitment Days.
Stage 3: Attending a Recruitment Day
Things start to get a bit exciting at this stage because we get to meet you in person and it's your chance to shine and show us what you're made of. You will be interviewed by one or more people who will want to find out more about any technical or specialist aspects of the role and how you fit them alongside any relevant role specific competencies that are important.
You might also be asked to do one or more (but not all!) of the following:
- Prepare and deliver a short presentation about your insights from some data that we ask you to look at.
- Work with some case study materials to produce a short written report / presentation to tell us what you've learnt from the material.
- Discover more about your leadership strengths and areas for development, especially if you will be managing people or teams. We may ask you to complete a personality questionnaire in advance of attending your Recruitment Day.
- If you are a technical specialist or part/fully qualified practitioner in finance, IT, HR or communications, you will almost certainly meet a member of the team you could be working with.
We'll give you full details about what's involved and what to expect when we invite you to attend.