In late December I left my place of work on a temp contract and was looking for work, which is a struggle at that time of year due to the first three months of the year being quiet in most industries. Someone shared on facebook that Admiral Insurance were taking people on so I logged onto Admirals recruitment site and had a little investigation. For those of you who don't know the Admiral Group is a large insurance company located throughout South Wales (Newport, Cardiff and Swansea). Apparently Admiral is expanding and was going to be doing some things I would like to do as well as things that I'm experienced in. So I filled in the on line application form for a CSR (Customer Service Representative) under the Gladiator brand. After completing the form I received an email saying I'd got through to the next stage which was a phone interview and asked to log back into Admirals recruitment site to select an interview slot. I chose 14:30 the following Thursday the 29th of January.
This was a few days away and it gave me a chance to have a more detailed look at the company. Go over my weak spots in interviews and come up with some answers for competency questions which I was a little out of practise with. Thursday 14:30 soon arrived and I received a phone call from a polite cheery voiced woman who proceeded to interview me. After forty-five minutes of stringent interviewing we reached the end and I was informed that I had passed and was invited to a 'meet and greet' the following Thursday at 09:30. All in all not a bad result and I had a week to prepare myself for what I was informed would be a three - maybe four hour chance for me to find out a bit more about the company plus be interviewed.
A week later and off I popped to Swansea, I'd been asked to get there for 09:00 which meant an early rise to leave the house 07:30, a twenty minute walk, half hour train journey and a slow amble to SA1 as I composed myself. Wearing my hair & makeup as professional as I could get it and dressed in professional top, trousers plus bag I looked the typical interviewee. I do have a confession to make at this stage, Admiral have three buildings in Swansea, one out in the vale and two in the SA1 development near town, along with 95% of my fellow applicants I went to the wrong building - I went to the main building 'Admiral Group House' when the Gladiator brand is located in the Ellipse building. After being informed we were at the wrong building I got directions from the security guard and led my fellow applicants three minutes down the road to the correct building.
We were greeted at the door by one of the recruitment girls (the recruitment team in Group House had phoned ahead to tell them what happened) and led through the call centre into one of the meeting rooms. The three recruitment people then took us through a presentation about Admiral (having done my research I knew most of it although I made sure to look interested). We were then given the traditional task of quizzing the person sat next to us fortunately me and the girl talked 10 to the dozen so we were able to get all the requested information out of each other. We were then given another presentation this time centring on the job itself and Gladiator itself.
At this point things got a little bit strange, we were then divided up into two groups of seven. The first group were to listen in to some agents on the floor (buddying) and be interviewed one by one while the second group (included) me stood waiting in a corridor for an hour. Every so often one of the first group would be pulled off the floor to be interviewed then we would 'buddy up' when they were all done. They did say we could wait in the chill out lounge but we didn't have a pass to get back in out of the corridor.
So an hour later the other team had been interviewed and left, meaning we got to 'buddy up' to an agent. I should say at this point that any name I give will be made up... just because. I sat down next to a young chap called Tim who gave the worst performance I'd ever seen in a call centre. After a few minutes I was having to point out where the information he needed was on the screen. During one call he put the client on hold and left the desk, I have no idea how long he was gone for but in that time the client had got bored, hung up, called back and had his query dealt with by another agent. Ideally I was hoping to pick something up to ask about during the interview but it didn't happen. Essentially for forty-five minutes I was sat at a blank screen whilst my agent was doing a tour of the room occasionally coming back to his desk (just to be clear he was not on a break) for a few minutes now and again. If this guy could get a job I was a dead cert to get a job if this was the level of worker Admiral had.
So after enduring this one of the recruitment staff collected me for the actual interview. It was her and another recruiter who I hadn't met yet sat side by side at a table with myself at the other end. The first question I was asked was 'had I enjoyed listening in?' I didn't want to start off on a bad foot or get a new colleague into trouble on the first day so I tried to sidestep by saying I didn't get to hear or see much due to the calls being long and awkward. After a 'how do you,' handshake and positioning myself on the chair in a positive open manner the interview began. The recruiter who I'd met I'll call Julie and the one who I'd not seen before the interview I'll call Bindy, they were both a bit 'sensible shoes' and it was quite hard getting them to open up - especially when they were the ones who should be getting me to open up. The interview didn't actually last long, I was asked a bit about my background and personal life which I answered in detail. I was asked a question about building rapport and asked to give some previous examples. I'd been expecting this and had practised an answer, I spoke about my previous call centre work and gave the examples of when I worked in a loan brokers talking about what the loan was for, when I worked for Vodafone I'd often chat about their model of phone and if they'd seen any models we had coming out they had their eye on for a future upgrade. Just giving examples that I could chat with a client and not leaving them hanging in an awkward pause - that kind of thing. They then asked about the gap I had in the last five years when I left the industry, rather than lie I said I'd left due to transphobia in the workplace and had looked to get out of the industry due to it having a negative affect on my career.
What I'm going to explain now is what every person in the transgender community has gone through. Their jaws hit the table and the penny dropped, given the clothes I was wearing, the makeup and the hair I'd have expected them to notice when I walked through the door. All of a sudden there was a panic in both their eyes, Bindy must have had some kind of auto reflex as she then gave a speech about Admiral being an equal opportunities employer. All very good to hear and at that point inside I gave a sigh of relief and was perked up for the rest of the interview, when (bearing in mind we're about six minutes in) Bindy ended the interview and and asked me to leave. I kept myself composed as its not the best idea to create a confrontation, a sentence famously said by Terrance Dicks or possibly Malcolm Hulke. I have put up with a lot of transphobic crap but I've never had the interview stopped and been removed from the building before. Everyone else got at least a twenty-five to forty minutes interview I was turfed out when the penny dropped that I was trans. Utterly disgusting.
I trudged home fully knowing I hadn't got the job, despite the experience of this 'meet and greet' when I'd looked into Admiral I thought it looked fantastic and thought (as I do now) it was an ideal workplace for me. The following Monday I received a generic email saying "we received a high calibre of candidate and some of the other candidates demonstrated a closer match to what we are recruiting for at this present time" in short absolute bull shit. My call centre experience was extensive - I'd done customer service, sales retentions, worked for brokers (which is what Gladiator is), managed departments, actually set up departments and worked in industries as extensive as banking to broadband suppliers.
However what this email also had which was rare on this day and age was a phone number to ring for individual feedback. I was still in this! Perhaps I could resit the interview with a non transphobe while management investigated Julie and Bindy! I proceeded to ring the number and spoke to a recruitment girl, I asked for feedback first before I made any complaints and the feedback was 'I hadn't given any examples of building rapport' if I wasn't already livid I was even more livid now. Not only had they been discriminatory during the interview they'd put a load of rubbish in the recording of it to cover their backs.
I told them that was incorrect and retold the exact examples I had given in my interview, I also said my treatment of having my interview stopped was nothing short of trans phobic. She escalated the call and eventually I spoke to two separate people who repeated the phrase: I'm sure that's not the case. Over the course of those two calls I stated my case that I'd had my interview stopped and been discriminated against by a transphobe but all I got in reply was 'I'm sure that's not the case' repeated back at me after every sentence. Eventually I was offered a call back from the head of recruitment which I accepted as I was getting nowhere with these two but I never received a further call.
There ends my first attempt to get a job with Admiral, ending in transphobia and a cover up by recruitment staff who didn't care. Despite my experience I still held hopes of working with them in the future, the fact is they are doing things I would like to do. Nevertheless as is the norm these days after getting rejected I would be unable to apply with them for six months. I'd like to say that I think this isn't an isolated incident and that Admiral is an equal opportunities employer but I'm sure that's not the case.
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