ITV Interview Questions
& Process

The ITV production journalist interview was pretty put together. I applied and got an interview. It was a panel interview with some senior journalists. They were nice and made it feel like a chat, which was good. It went for about 45-60 mins. They asked about my CV and gave me some situations to think about. The CV questions were about my past journalism work, like news production experience, stories I’d done, and how I influenced content. The situation questions were to see how I’d act in a real newsroom.

First up was a 40 minute chat about my CV and past work. Then, a quick fifteen minute "exam" where I had to watch a reel they made and point out any production mistakes. After that, we went into the video room and I had to set up the cameras to copy 3 shots, and then make up my own shot for news.

I was contacted by a recruiter in April '24 to set up an interview with the Chief Enterprise Architect. The video call with the Head went fine, we even found common ground, but it was short. This was the only person I interacted with during the whole process. I'm not sure if the hiring manager was serious about hiring for the recently reposted job, but he did explain their hiring process since the recruiter didn't, and was happy I sounded English. To finish the quick call, the hiring manager mentioned I'd need to do a technical test, which everyone had to do before moving on. As expected, I got a tech assessment, a PDF that was a couple of pages long. I was told to limit my time to a few hours. By this point, it should have been obvious that ITV wasn't actually looking to hire for the "opening." The one they're still advertising. This was hands-down one of the worst and most poorly designed (presented) technical tests I've encountered. Shocking in many ways... maybe on purpose. You can learn a lot about a company and its department from the "assessment" they give candidates. It tells you everything. Sure enough, after submitting a working PySpark job (which I tested) via email, I was ghosted. I followed up over a week later and got some strange feedback that clearly didn't apply to my submission (none of the points were relevant to the Python script). I sent the assessment and solution again, suggesting there might have been an error. Maybe they could actually look at the solution... but nothing. Ghosted again. No response from careers@itv or the hiring manager. Absolutely infuriating and unacceptable, especially from a FTSE 100 company. I'm not sure what kind of discrimination occurred, but it's reprehensible.

The interview had three stages. First was a call with HR who asked around three questions. Next stage was a 30 minute Google Meets call with 2 people. Third stage was 105 minutes (precisely). It was a 20 min presentation followed by a 45 min interview. I was told I would receive an outcome 7-8 days later. I had not received any contact so 14 days later I contacted HR. They emailed and assured me that they would reply by the end of the following day. On day 21, I emailed again and received a call from HR apologising and telling me that 'it's tricky because there is no negative feedback and they really liked you, but you were not successful.' Genuinely terrible experience and I am sad about it. I really thought it would have been much better considering the effort each applicant would have put into that interview.