Weekly Bangla Mirror | Bangla Mirror, Bangladeshi news in UK, bangla mirror news
It is 10.30am, and Zahra is sitting in a business centre in Preston, attaching marshmallows to sticks of uncooked spaghetti. There are 30 interview candidates in the grey-carpeted room, split into groups of five, competing to build food towers. Already today they have had to solve anagrams, complete quizzes and rank the importance of various kitchen items. Just to be shortlisted for this two-hour interview round, Zahra had to write an online application consisting of 10 paragraphs about her work experience. As she builds her spaghetti and marshmallow tower, she thinks: “What am I actually doing here? This doesn’t relate to the job at all.”
The job in question is not what Zahra, 20, plans to do for ever. It is as a crew member for Wingstop, a chicken shop chain, with a salary of £10.80 an hour – 80p an hour above minimum wage for her age range. During the interview, she says, “a woman with a notepad was staring at us, and all the shift managers were watching. It was so awkward.” A week or so later, Zahra received a short rejection email. “It felt like a waste of time,” she says. “What a joke.”
This is far from Zahra’s first experience of long, tedious recruitment processes for jobs paying around the minimum wage. According to figures announced this week, UK unemployment reached its highest rate in almost five years at 5.2%. For those aged 18-24, the rate has risen to 14% – another five-year high, and the market for entry-level opportunities has become increasingly competitive. Experts say hiring staff has also become more costly and risky for British businesses. “There’s been an increase in the minimum wage and the employer’s national insurance, against a backdrop of really challenging trading environments,” says Martin Warnes, managing director of the job website Reed.co.uk. He believes this is leading businesses to “de-risk the recruitment process” by “putting more emphasis on pre-employment screening to help evidence that they’re bringing the right person into the business. The flipside of that is that more burden is put on the individual who’s seeking work, and what feels like a mismatch in terms of the effort of the application process v the pay rate.”
Eve, 19, from London, is on a gap year after finishing her A-levels. As well as speculatively handing out her CV to 30 employers near where she lives (“I didn’t hear back from any of them”), she says she has applied for 40 jobs online. One of these, a shop-floor sales assistant role, was with Inditex, the parent company of high-street brands including Zara, Pull&Bear and Bershka. She was invited for a 90-minute group interview with about 20 other candidates. “We had a career day in school, and we did activities like group interviews,” she says. “So I thought it would be fine.” She did not anticipate that the interview would be more like an exercise in public speaking. “It was nerve-racking,” she says. “I was really desperate for the job … I’ve worked in shops before, and I can very easily speak to customers. But this was about talking in front of a big group of people. Speaking to one customer is different from speaking in front of 20 people.”
The interview began with Eve having to introduce the person next to her to the other candidates and recruiters. She was then placed in a smaller group, handed an iPad and told to create an outfit for a celebrity such as Lady Gaga, before talking about it to the whole room. “It was a bit weird because, realistically, this wouldn’t have anything to do with the job,” she says. After that, the candidates were given scenarios that might happen in a shop, and had to describe how they would deal with them, in front of everyone. Finally, the recruiters put up pictures of different items of clothing, and candidates raised their hands to guess which Inditex brand they were from. “You’re having to find a way to get a word in over other people who obviously want a job as well, which makes it harder to get hired,” Eve says. “It’s like The Hunger Games, but you’re all trying to get a job in a shop where you’re going to be folding clothes all day, for just over minimum wage.”
Group assessments, explains Warnes, have been a fixture of hiring for a long time. “I was part of a group assessment a number of years ago,” he says. “You would probably expect to see them more around graduate trainee scheme-type roles. Here, it seems to be a frontline customer role that’s having the assessment.” He says the company is probably looking to assess candidates’ “ability to work as a team and their communication skills, which might be really important to the role. However, to the individual who has been part of that, it might have felt onerous, particularly if they didn’t get the job; it was probably half a day of their time that they’ve committed without success. That might be being repeated over multiple jobs. And that is a really difficult situation for jobseekers.”
Alice Martin, head of research at the Work Foundation, a thinktank based at Lancaster University, believes that some employers are making recruitment processes harder because “they’re taking advantage to some extent of the fact that there are that many people out there who need the job. We have a high number of people looking for work and a shrinking number of jobs available. So to some extent, that puts power into the hands of employers to be quite selective about who they take on.” And big group interviews are more efficient. “It’s the best time spent for them to see that many people in one go.”
But what if the group interview tasks have no bearing on the job itself? Warnes says: “I think if you’re looking to test someone’s skills and their fit for your organisation, then you want to create an environment that will be close to a real-life scenario. If we’re asking people to do presentations to groups, if that’s not part of the role, then you’re testing the wrong skill.”
Big group interview presentations are not the only hoops jobseekers are having to jump through. Maya, 22, graduated with a degree in neuroscience in 2024, and started applying for part-time jobs to tide her over while she searched for a full-time role. When she applied for a job in a tuition centre, she was asked to work a four-hour trial shift, unpaid. The company had also said it would pay for the enhanced DBS check she needed to work with children, which costs £49.50, but she was never compensated for it. She later found a job in an art club, which not only paid for her two-hour trial shift but also covered the cost of her DBS check.
In late 2024, she found an advert for a minimum-wage marketing job and immediately sent in her CV. The company invited her for a 20-minute online interview, which went well, and then asked her to go to its offices for the next stage. “They didn’t specify what the interview entailed, but I was desperate for a chance,” Maya says. So she paid the £30 train fare into London. “It turned out we would be practising door-to-door sales,” she says. “The manager took another candidate and me to multiple areas in London. We had to pay our own tube fare, and then watch while he tried to persuade people to sign up for a charity scheme. No one signed up.” After four hours, she and the other candidate were taken to a “random food shop to do a writing task on what skills we think are important for door-to-door sales”. Then the company passed Maya on to another in-person interview stage. She pulled out of the process – realising that the “marketing specialist” role wasn’t what it was advertised to be. “The pay was £8 an hour,” she says. “That isn’t minimum wage for a 21-year-old, but they were getting away with it because of the commission rate.” She believes the process was “taking advantage of people”.
When Zahra applied for a sales assistant role at TK Maxx in August 2025, she had to do a personality test and was then invited into the shop. It was supposed to be a group interview, but only two other people showed up, along with four senior staff members. They were asked to do an “interview task”, which involved going on to the shop floor, choosing a section and organising it. “It wasn’t even an interview,” she says. “We were basically by ourselves, on different sections of the shop, making their merchandising look nice.” After 20 minutes, the manager brought out another rack and told Zahra to do the same again for another 10 minutes. Then, after an hour, the process was over. “I never even got rejected. I just got ghosted.” She hasn’t set foot in that TK Maxx since.
When Grace, 20, applied for a minimum-wage job as an admin assistant at a nonprofit organisation, she did not expect that the recruitment process would amount to 10 hours of what she considers to have been unpaid work. The first stage was an admin task – building a database – followed by the second stage, a virtual interview a week later. Grace was then invited to the organisation’s office in London to complete the third stage, which was two hours of assessments and interviews. One of these tasks was to rebuild an Excel database that would be used by the organisation’s staff, as its old one was out of date. “Even if I didn’t get the job, I think they’d be building on my work,” she says. “I count that as a trial shift because it felt like I was making a spreadsheet and then passing it on to them to use. It felt weird.”
Under UK law, candidates aren’t entitled to the national minimum wage if the tasks only last a few hours and are deemed proportionate to the role. “There’s a grey area here around assessing a potential candidate v actually that candidate doing work,” says Warnes. “Bringing someone in and assessing their skills and cultural fit is really important,” he says, and this may include role play exercises with other team members. However, “the law is quite clear that if someone is doing real work, they should be paid”.
Grace did get the job. But she was surprised that – given the interview process was “so strenuous” – the job itself, which she worked in for around a year, was “very easy”.
Martin says that, again, this is common at an insecure, often low-paid end of the job market where “workers tend to cycle in and out of jobs”. Often, either the job itself is made redundant, or it’s so low-income that people attempt to move on to something higher-paying. “There often isn’t a lot of time spent by the employer in training up those employees or providing progression routes for them because it’s seen as quite a transient type of work,” she says. And so potential employers use the “recruitment process itself to try to provide some of that initial training”.
After the companies were contacted by the Guardian, a spokesperson for TK Maxx said that “store‑based work is not part of our interview process”, and that, after reviewing Eve’s experience, “the practices outlined would not reflect our norms, values or recruitment approach”. A spokesperson from Zara said that its recruitment process is “open, inclusive and accessible to people without prior retail experience”. It said the group interview “uses informal activities to understand communication and teamwork skills, which are core to the role”. Wingstop said that “assessment centres are common practice in hospitality and are used in place of traditional interviews with the aim of bringing out people’s personalities” and to ensure “candidates display teamwork [and] creativity and are service-minded”. All tasks, it said, “are relevant to Wingstop UK’s values”.
In September, after an online interview and paid “training” (which was sorting out the stock room), Zahra got a job as a server in a cafe. She never had a contract for this minimum-wage role and often worked long shifts by herself without a break, as her employers weren’t willing to hire more staff. She quit after five months and secured another part-time job at a supermarket after a 20-minute interview. “It’s above minimum wage, but it’s not my passion,” she says. “I just needed a part-time job to make some money. And everyone else is being stingy about hiring people. So I’ll take anything.” Her plan is to work there for three months before she goes travelling, after which she plans to return to studying. “I just hope the job market gets better by the time I’ve graduated,” she says.
