56 Jaw-Dropping Job Interview Fails You Won’t Believe Actually Happened
“Hello”
…
“Hey! How are you doing?”
…
“Oh yeah? I’m in an interview now”
…
“I think it is going really well!”
At this point I was thinking about how she apparently doesn’t have a good grasp on reality. I stare at her the entire time she’s on the phone. She hung up after another couple of minutes. I asked her one more question and ended the interview.
No Job offer made.
Oh my god, I miss hiring so much. Digging through stacks of résumés and conducting awkward interviews was so much fun. I screened for mostly administrative support/HR positions.
Not one of the following people was hired:
-the guy who put a poor-quality, red-eye, obviously-cropped-from-a-group-photo into his PDF résumé and then started his profile section with “Christian father of three”
-the lady with the email address witchylover69@[domain].com
-the lady who mis-typed her email on her resume so it bounced back, and her phone was disconnected
-the guy who started his cover letter with “As a former manager, I am looking for a lower-status position where I can just relax…” and then continued with a 7-page résumé going back to 1975 with his doctorate degree, research stuff, publications… and zero relevant admin experience
-the lady who declined a second interview and told me she was fed up with Austin and was moving back to California, and then called back two days later to say she changed her mind and wanted to interview after all
And my personal favorite: The guy who made racist remarks in the interview (“Well, you know how those Hispanics are.” Both of my panel interview partners were Hispanic.)
-I just remembered another crazy one. I was eight months pregnant, leading the interview panel for an admin/front desk position. We had a candidate with some prior experience, but mostly non-related library experience. I had her pegged as my third or fourth strongest candidate, and then she absolutely [tanked] the interview. One of our questions was, “This position may require occasional overtime during busy periods. Are you able to work overtime with advance notice when required?” She then answered, “Yes, that’s no problem. I’m divorced, and I don’t have any family…” and I’m thinking to myself, okay, that’s a weird thing to say, but whatever. Then she continued, “I mean, I don’t have any kids, so I don’t have to answer to anyone or be on call. But that’s cool, if that’s your thing. (Then she gestured to my enormous belly.) “But you know, if that’s what you want to do, I don’t have a problem with it. I just don’t want to.”
It took me about three seconds to realize she meant me, because I wasn’t sitting there thinking, “I’m so pregnant.” I was there to interview candidates, and didn’t talk about it at all. None of anyone’s business, to tell the truth. Poor lady was just going to keep digging herself deeper, and a teeny part of me wanted to let her squirm.
Not the hiring manager, but plenty of interviews.
It’s not the horror stories per se, but the ones that have no business being there are sometimes heart breaking.
I was interviewing for a QA Engineer – not a QA tester after the dot-com bust. But this guy worked for our company before and recently got laid off, so he had priority over any external candidate. He was mid-career, probably rode the dot-com bubble to a nice house with a monster mortgage payment, a nice car with a huge payment, private school for his kids – thought it would last forever.
He did 16 years of manual testing. But – we don’t pay 6 figure salaries for manual testers anymore. I had 30 minutes to ask him a whole bunch of automation/programming questions (that was the job we were interviewing for) – I even tried to ease it up so that he could answer anything.
But he kept saying, with a bit of desperation, “I can learn”. I really felt sorry for him because – if you haven’t learned how to make your job easier (e.g. automation) after 16, I’m not sure you have the aptitude to.
He essentially had a [good], easy life for 16 years, and you could see the terror in his eyes as his dream job was ripped away from him with no hope of coming back.
He never bothered to keep his skills current. And though he was 10 years old, he really felt like a kid trying to prove something. I knew within 2 minutes he couldn’t do that job.
Another guy worked on some type of circuit board (our company was hardware and software). Also laid off, he needed to get a job to stay in the US (for visa reasons). But this poor kid didn’t know anything beyond this circuit board.
Q) How would you test a piece of software…
A) well, in this board, we had these external outputs where we had to check.
Q) Okay, but software?
A) Well, the board was checked by software….
He even spent 10 minutes of the 30 minute interview drawing the board, even though I did not ask. After about 5 questions that referred to this magical hardware board that had nothing to do with anything. I had to say, “without mentioning your board, how would you…”
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