Even the promise of working alongside Mickey Mouse doesn’t guarantee that candidates will show up at the appointed time for job interviews, as Disneyland Paris learned recently.

Only 20% of the candidates who had been selected to interview in London last month for jobs with the theme park and resort actually turned up.

“I have to say we have been very disappointed this time,” Jean-Noel Thiollier, director of employment and remuneration, told Recruiter after two days of interviews in London. One thousand candidates had been chosen for job interviews from many thousands of UK-based applicants responding to print and online advertisements. About 180 turned up for their meetings.

“This is a huge drop-out, which we’re not used to either in the UK or in any other country in Europe,” Thiollier said. “We only met about 20% of the people we were supposed to meet. Everybody’s surprised.”

On the other hand, Thiollier added, “the candidates we’ve met have actually proved quite good; we’ve hired quite a few people out of the candidates we’ve met”.

Most candidates from London were seeking permanent jobs, although many were willing to take up seasonal or short-term contract work as a second choice, Thiollier said. “The second trend we noticed was, most of these people have a job at the moment, so they’re not unemployed, which I think is interesting.”

He said that it had been suggested the three weeks allotted between advertisements and interviews may have been too short a notice period for candidates. Other than that, he said he had no idea why the turn-out was poor.

Thiollier and other Disneyland Paris recruiters came to the UK with 6,000 permanent, seasonal and short-term contract roles on offer, of which about 250-300 were permanent roles across marketing, HR, finance and other corporate functions. The remainder were primarily customer-facing jobs in hospitality and park operations, such as the rides.

The Disneyland Paris team also visited Cardiff during the UK trip and met candidates at a job fair where no appointments were necessary.