Capco: Dishonest recruitment practices—inefficient, unprofessional and blatant lies.
I read the voluminous negative reviews about Capco and thought: it can’t be that bad, can it? But having now experienced what other reviewers have reported, I now know that oh yes it can. My own sorry interaction with Capco began following an innocent application with a relatively humdrum phone screening interview with an in-house recruiter. I was progressed and invited to attend a 90 minute face-to-face interview at the Capco location in Canary Wharf, with a Principal Consultant and an HR rep, to be followed, if successful, by a 45 minute case study, with a Partner, immediately afterwards.
Following the interview, I was asked to remain in the room, to be told whether I had been progressed to the case study with the Partner. After a five minute wait, an HR assistant came in, and informed me that I had indeed been progressed to the second phase. However, she advised, although a partner should have been available to meet me, no one was, which meant I would have to travel back—a round-trip train journey of 5 hours. The assistant advised that I would hear from HR with feedback and next steps. Two days later I received an email from the original HR contact who had pre-screened me. He congratulated me on a good interview, and advised he was awaiting further feedback and would be in touch regarding next steps in due course.
Almost a week later, when I hadn’t heard anything further, I sent a follow-up email asking for an update. The subsequent week, when I still hadn’t received a response, I wrote to someone higher up explaining that I had been progressed, but now HR were not providing information on next steps, and not responding to my requests for information. I also observed, in my email, that Capco’s practices had received a lot of negative publicity, and that while I preferred to keep an open mind, I was becoming concerned by the ‘radio silence’.
This person responded within the hour. He apologised for the lack of communication, promising that he would look into it and get back to me “early next week”, and reassuring me that all the negative press that Capco has received on Glassdoor and other sites is no longer representative. Capco has been completely transformed, he assured me breathlessly. Late on Wednesday—which hardly counted as “early” in the week--I received a short note from him, with an embedded note from another senior colleague, promising to phone me the next day, to advise on next steps. When she finally phoned, early evening the next day, she claimed that, in fact, I hadn’t been progressed after all. I explained that I had been told the interview had gone very well and that I had been advised I was progressed. She countered by saying that I must have “misunderstood”. When I insisted that I hadn’t, she countered again by claiming that the HR assistant didn’t have the authority to tell me that I had been progressed. When I then explained that the interviewers had told me that the assistant would come into the room to advise me of the outcome, things became even more surreal. She countered by saying that the interviewers didn’t have the authority to progress me. She then started providing feedback from the interview, that allegedly related to me, that bore no resemblance to my interview and the feedback I had actually received from the interviewers.
This all represents an object lesson in the dishonesty that underpins the Capco recruitment practice. I was invited to interview, progressed, and then, following radio silence, having to work hard to get a response, ultimately “unprogressed”. In the final analysis, there was no meaningful apology, and only discourtesy, casual indifference, and insulting behaviour.
