Acudí a una entrevista en Capita (Londonderry County Borough, Northern Ireland)
Entrevista
Basic but friendly . Interviewer seemed genuinely interested to listen , good atmosphere and welcoming environment . Salary could be more competitive or market rate . Overall good experience and worth knowing job description .
Solicité el puesto a través de un captador. El proceso duró 2 días. Acudí a una entrevista en Capita en ene 2009
Entrevista
Initially had a telephone interview where I was asked a few loose questions on my background and experience. I was asked several questions on virtualisation and my experience thereof.
It was quite a relaxed informal interview - although I later learned the recruiting manager (and boss to be) was not very technical and was following a script and expecting certain key phrases in the answers I was giving. Nothing too taxing overall.
Was called in for a second interview which started off as a little more of the same (background and experience), but I later learned was more to see whether I was presentable and had people skills. Moved onto a couple of scenarios about how to move a IT service from a physical datacentre environment into a Capita hosted Datacentre environment - again looking for key phrases such as carrying out an physical evaluation of the existing environment (using products like Platespin) etc to see what the current actual load on the physical servers was, also identifying a 'service at a time' rather than trying to move the entire datacentre at once. Need to mention a few popular P2V software products and perhaps mention a period of parallel running (rather than going for a 'big bang' cutover) shows that you are aware of risks in moving into a virtualised datacentre. Do all that and you are pretty much in.
The interviewer on both occasions was the (not very technical) hiring manager and was easily impressed - although in retrospect I could've been talking martian and if I'd mentioned the key phrases I think he'd have offered.
Was followed quite quickly by a verbal offer, and a written contract in 2 weeks.
Overall impression of the company is quite poor (to put it politely), quite a low level or organisation coupled with a high level of 'silos' mean that getting anything done is more a case of luck than any sort of judgement. A prevalent 'Blame Culture' which pervades from the top of the organisation right through to the bottom makes things harder still - as well as a large number of 'Jobsworths' and tattle tales makes working there quite unpleasant.
I really wouldn't want to recommend working here to anyone.
Capita is basically the Ryan Air of IT Services companies, do everything on the cheap, nothing without a project and NO product portfolio to speak of - everything is engineered on the spot - no Purchase Order == no design. Little or no re-use of designs either with everyone guarding whatever they have like it was their retirement fund.
If we were moving a client's physical infrastructure to our virtual datacentre, how would you go about it - and tell me what things you would need to look out for.