The Manchester Masters Blog

It’s quite strange actually.  The 10 ‘Masters’ who were our first intake in 2009 are synonymous with the title so it’s quite bizarre that – after two long, gruelling but very rewarding Assessment days – we now have our 2010 x 10!

At the end of January, we closed the application – graduates had to upload a 30 second film (Google some on YouTube – they’re amazing) and answer five tough questions.

Six judges then spent a very long day judging these applications in order to achieve a top notch shortlist of between 40 and 50 candidates to take forward to the shortlist for 2010.

Tuesday and Wednesday of this week saw us squirreled away in Manchester Metropolitan University with the 44 shortlisted – terrified but highly excited – finalists and 14 – equally terrified and excited – judges!

Judges including leading Manchester agency reps (from True North, the eWord, MIDAS Tangerine PR), senior marketing gurus from top Manchester organisations (Cash Generator, Marketing Manchester, Manchester City Council, Chartered Institute of Marketing) a journalist from The Drum (top marketing journal), and marketing programme leaders from both MMU and the University of Manchester (Salford Uni was invited but could not spare anyone.)

This was serious stuff.  Through a series of individual and group tasks, designed by top HR specialists to give the candidates chance to shine and the judges the chance to spot potential stars, we observed and scored all day.  At the end of the first day, armed with our scores and observations, as well psychometric tests from Psycuity – leading business psychology company – we set about the task of whittling our 44 down to the final 20 to be invited back for the second day.

The second day was more (and less) of the same (more intense but less people) with individual interviews added in to give us greater knowledge of the candidates.

Again, the end of the day saw the judges using a whole host of scores, tests, observations and – to be honest, gut feelings – to select our final, very impressive 10.  And here they are!  And an impressive bunch they are too:

And so another year begins.

This year’s intake has impressed beyond all expectation (and the expectation was quite high!) and I have a feeling our 10 shiny new Manchester Masters will be just as good.

(Oh – by the way – in case you’re worried about the 34 who didn’t make it through, we ran a ‘matchmaking’ session yesterday which was attended by 20 leading Manchester businesses, all in the market for graduates and nearly every one said they’d like to interview between 4 – 5 grads for potential positions, so hopefully everyone else will be well on their way to a career in marketing.)