I had a great experience flying with the airlines and the 4 day break in Dubai about 3 years ago was wonderful. So this made me look for jobs in Dubai. Upon research, this looked like an organization with great growth and good employee benefits. So I have been applying for many eligible jobs over the last 3 years. Finally, I heard back from the company.
Applied late Sept 2014, received email for 30 minute video interview in late Dec 2014
The interview request came with terms and conditions showing pretty much all the benefits but without the basic salary to which most of the benefits are tied. Terms and conditions are confidential, so I cannot share details, but looked generous on most counts. Upon request, I provided details of my current salary with breakdown before the interview.
Did not like the interview process.
1) To start with, for a 30 minute interview, the interviewers came in 6 minutes late and finished the interview 7 minutes before end time.
2) The room had so much echo, that during my video interview it was so difficult to understand what the interviewer was asking. In spite of letting the interviewers know of this right at the beginning, the technical interviewer was sitting so far from the microphone and I had ask most questions repeated 2-3 times.
3) The interview started with recruiter saying that this is the salary cap we can offer. Do you want to continue the interview? I said yes, let's continue and I will let you know later after I crunch my numbers if I am still interested. I cannot understand why they did not communicate this in the original terms and conditions. It would have helped me a lot to decide if I even wanted to attend the interview or not, saving everyone time. (mind you, my interview was at US time 11:30 PM, ie, Dubai local time 8:30 am).
4) I felt that the technical interviewer was very unprofessional with her expressions on my responses. Even if my answers did not meet their expectations, I would expect a polite and courteous response. The technical interviewer was making signs to the recruiter to cut the interview early as though I could not see them. This really upset me.
5) Also based on the information provided so far, the allowance constituted around 40% of the package thus making the base pay small which is used for all other benefit calculation. Even though my current salary details were made available, the potential offer barely matched my current package.
I sincerely hope this was just my bad experience and that most others are taken through a better process. I still think Emirates can offer challenging and satisfying opportunities, but I am out after this experience.