The whole experience was ridiculous from the start. First things first, when I was contacted by pareto I was very confused as I had never heard of them and they called me to discuss a job I had applied for? I realised, that they had advertised a job that I had applied for making it seem as if I am applying to the actual company when my application had actually gone to pareto! Very deceiving. Anyways, the lady who called was very nice and did a quick telephone interview. Based on this, she said there is a role local to me that seems to match my skill set and experience. She said she was putting me through to the assessment centre, where there would be about 20 others who will also be after this role. This sounded great to me, and I was called multiple times by the lady to try and help prepare me for a presentation I had to do at the assessment centre. On the day of the assessment centre, I turned up to find that there were a hell of a lot of people waiting in the reception area! Much to my surprise, they were all also going for the assessment day! Not 20 people, but nearly double that number of people. I was absolutely shocked. The entire room was full of other candidates! We then had a group of people come in from the company and pareto also. They gave a presentation and then we had to stand up and do self introductions. Our names, famous person that we want to represent and also our best non-academic achievement. Once you had done this, you were asked questions by the lady from pareto who actually seemed very bored and disinterested. Saying tell me more? Was that fun? In the most bored voice ever. Only the really confident and loud people will stand out here. I think they actually decided who they wanted to hire from this moment itself. The next thing was a group exercise. Stupid exercise as we then had to "save" the famous person who we initially picked from being thrown off a boat. Not very fair as I picked an actress because I didn't know what the relevance of this was. People who had been to other assessment centres for pareto knew and therefore picked bear grylls and obviously won this task. Then came the longest 4 hours of my life. Presentations and one on one interviews. Whilst all the other candidates had theirs, the others had to just sit and ask the current employees of the company questions. Extremely boring when this was for 3 hours straight!! It was painful sitting through that to say the least! Then they went to make decisions as to who was successful for the job role (only 6 people would go through). The other group of people they picked are people who are successful with pareto, and who pareto will help to find another job. The remaining people were those who basically got told unfortunately you've not been successful, a quick bye bye kind of thing. What a waste of time. I found that the group of us who were unsuccessful to anything were ALL ethnic minorities. How convenient right?! Do not bother applying for anything with pareto, absolute waste of time. They have too many other people in the assessment centre making it very difficult to get noticed or to even get the chance to say anything. Only people who are loud and sometimes rude get noticed. Not fair for people who genuinely have the skills for the job and only speak to add value to a conversation. Also, the role I applied for was a Graduate Technical Business Development Executive. Yet people who haven't studied either IT or Business seemed to have got the role. Didn't make any sense to me. Clearly people who have been to uni and studied these subjects shouldn't have if you can get a supposed IT job by studying drama! Save yourself the time and effort and apply for job roles directly to the company where you actually have a fair chance.