The brutal hunt for low-paid work: ‘It’s like The Hunger Games – however for a job folding garments’ | Job searching

It is 10.30am, and Zahra is sitting in a enterprise centre in Preston, attaching marshmallows to sticks of raw spaghetti. There are 30 interview candidates within the grey-carpeted room, cut up into teams of 5, competing to construct meals towers. Already right now they’ve needed to clear up anagrams, full quizzes and rank the significance of assorted kitchen objects. Just to be shortlisted for this two-hour interview spherical, Zahra needed to write a web-based utility consisting of 10 paragraphs about her work expertise. 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 query shouldn’t be what Zahra, 20, plans to do for ever. It is as a crew member for Wingstop, a rooster store chain, with a wage of £10.80 an hour – 80p an hour above minimal wage for her age vary. 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.” Per week or so later, Zahra acquired a brief rejection e-mail. “It felt like a waste of time,” she says. “What a joke.”

This is way from Zahra’s first expertise of lengthy, tedious recruitment processes for jobs paying across the minimal wage. According to figures introduced this week, UK unemployment reached its highest price in virtually 5 years at 5.2%. For these aged 18-24, the speed has risen to 14% – one other five-year excessive, and the marketplace for entry-level alternatives has change into more and more aggressive. Experts say hiring workers has additionally change into extra pricey and dangerous for British companies. “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 web site Reed.co.uk. He believes that is main companies 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 niche yr after ending her A-levels. As properly as speculatively handing out her CV to 30 employers close to the place she lives (“I didn’t hear back from any of them”), she says she has utilized for 40 jobs on-line. One of those, a shop-floor gross sales assistant position, was with Inditex, the father or mother firm of high-street manufacturers together with Zara, Pull&Bear and Bershka. She was invited for a 90-minute group interview with about 20 different 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 didn’t anticipate that the interview can be extra like an train in public talking. “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 started with Eve having to introduce the particular person subsequent to her to the opposite candidates and recruiters. She was then positioned in a smaller group, handed an iPad and informed to create an outfit for a celeb reminiscent of Lady Gaga, earlier than speaking about it to the entire room. “It was a bit weird because, realistically, this wouldn’t have anything to do with the job,” she says. After that, the candidates got situations that may occur in a store, and needed to describe how they’d cope with them, in entrance of everybody. Finally, the recruiters put up footage of various objects of clothes, and candidates raised their arms to guess which Inditex model they have been 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 very 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 corporate might be seeking 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 analysis on the Work Foundation, a thinktank primarily based at Lancaster University, believes that some employers are making recruitment processes tougher as a result of “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 massive group interviews are extra environment friendly. “It’s the best time spent for them to see that many people in one go.”

But what if the group interview duties haven’t any 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 shows aren’t the one hoops jobseekers are having to leap by. Maya, 22, graduated with a level in neuroscience in 2024, and began making use of for part-time jobs to tide her over whereas she looked for a full-time position. When she utilized for a job in a tuition centre, she was requested to work a four-hour trial shift, unpaid. The firm had additionally mentioned it could pay for the improved DBS examine she wanted to work with kids, which prices £49.50, however she was by no means compensated for it. She later discovered a job in an artwork membership, which not solely paid for her two-hour trial shift but in addition coated the price of her DBS examine.

In late 2024, she discovered an advert for a minimum-wage advertising and marketing job and instantly despatched in her CV. The firm invited her for a 20-minute on-line interview, which went properly, after which requested her to go to its places of work for the following stage. “They didn’t specify what the interview entailed, but I was desperate for a chance,” Maya says. So she paid the £30 practice 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 4 hours, she and the opposite candidate have been 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 corporate handed Maya on to a different in-person interview stage. She pulled out of the method – realising that the “marketing specialist” position wasn’t what it was marketed 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 method was “taking advantage of people”.

When Zahra utilized for a gross sales assistant position at TK Maxx in August 2025, she needed to do a character take a look at and was then invited into the store. It was presupposed to be a gaggle interview, however solely two different individuals confirmed up, together with 4 senior workers members. They have been requested to do an “interview task”, which concerned occurring to the store flooring, selecting a bit 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 supervisor introduced out one other rack and informed Zahra to do the identical once more for one more 10 minutes. Then, after an hour, the method was over. “I never even got rejected. I just got ghosted.” She hasn’t set foot in that TK Maxx since.

When Grace, 20, utilized for a minimum-wage job as an admin assistant at a nonprofit organisation, she didn’t count on that the recruitment course of would quantity to 10 hours of what she considers to have been unpaid work. The first stage was an admin job – constructing a database – adopted by the second stage, a digital interview every week later. Grace was then invited to the organisation’s workplace in London to finish the third stage, which was two hours of assessments and interviews. One of those duties was to rebuild an Excel database that may be utilized by the organisation’s workers, as its outdated one was outdated. “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 nationwide minimal wage if the duties solely final a couple of hours and are deemed proportionate to the position. “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 occasionally embody position play workouts with different group 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 shocked that – given the interview course of was “so strenuous” – the job itself, which she labored in for round a yr, was “very easy”.

Martin says that, once more, that is widespread at an insecure, usually low-paid finish of the job market the place “workers tend to cycle in and out of jobs”. Often, both the job itself is made redundant, or it’s so low-income that individuals try to maneuver on to one thing 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 businesses have been contacted by the Guardian, a spokesperson for TK Maxx mentioned that “store‑based work is not part of our interview process”, and that, after reviewing Eve’s expertise, “the practices outlined would not reflect our norms, values or recruitment approach”. A spokesperson from Zara mentioned that its recruitment course of is “open, inclusive and accessible to people without prior retail experience”. It mentioned the group interview “uses informal activities to understand communication and teamwork skills, which are core to the role”. Wingstop mentioned 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 make sure “candidates display teamwork [and] creativity and are service-minded”. All duties, it mentioned, “are relevant to Wingstop UK’s values”.

In September, after a web-based interview and paid “training” (which was checking out the inventory room), Zahra acquired a job as a server in a restaurant. She by no means had a contract for this minimum-wage position and infrequently labored lengthy shifts by herself with out a break, as her employers weren’t keen to rent extra workers. She give up after 5 months and secured one other part-time job at a grocery store 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 3 months earlier than she goes travelling, after which she plans to return to finding out. “I just hope the job market gets better by the time I’ve graduated,” she says.
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