I'm a little miffed right now after receiving an email which informed me that my "score wasn't high enough to proceed further" on the online customer service assessment they had me take. I'm miffed because I didn't feel the questionnaire asked very substantive questions which would provide a valid measure of my ability to provide good customer service. One of the questions asked what grades I got in high school. In high school I was an under-performer (to put it mildly). However, I graduated from college with honors and a 3.57 GPA. So where was the college performance question? Not on their test. Other questions were too ambiguous to give me a good sense of the situation that they were asking me to resolve with equally ambiguous answers. In my own subjective opinion I do feel I'm outstanding at customer service, and that that wasn't captured by the questions they asked and the way they asked them. Also, if Allstate wants to send out a "you failed" email, the least they could do would be to include what you scored, and the score they desired. As it is I have no idea how close or how far I was too their arbitrary "you pass" line. It was probably the worst personality/customer service assessment test I've ever taken. While questions and answers were ambiguous and lacked context or the ability to express necessary steps to be taken before or after utilizing a response (in a customer service scenario) often times I didn't feel that they even offered very good answers. It's really irritating being dehumanized, "scored", and declined by a poorly worded and constructed customer service evaluation. After the experience I have no interest in working for Allstate in ANY capacity.
So if you're looking at this job, be prepared to take their asinine Customer Service Battery evaluation thingy online. And be prepared to find many of the questions and possible answers obtuse, insubstantial, incomplete, or just plain wrong. And then be prepared to receive an email moments later indicating that the software has "declined" you automatically. Seriously.
Even the initial telephone screening had a strong assembly line feel to it. The recruitment guy on the other end of the line was nice enough but it was clear that he was just reading from a script and then typing my answers into a box. He verified the data I'd submitted on my online app, verified my interest in the job for which I'd applied, and then asked some typical interview style questions:
A la, "Tell me about a specific time you exceeded customer expectations..."
The steps I took were:
1) Online application through their career website
2) Telephone screen with a recruitment rep
3) Online assessment (which they have you take if they liked the results of your telephone screen)
At no point did I feel like I was being treated like a human in the Allstate hiring process. I'd recommend looking elsewhere.