Yes, this. There’s nothing worse than manually entering everything, and then being told you can upload your resume.
During an interview for an experienced position, the manager I was talking to mentioned that he “just called a guy who had left for the weekend and made him come back. He was 100 miles away when he got the call.”
It wasn’t so much that he needed the guy to get something finished. It was that you could tell he enjoyed the control he had over the guy. He even went so far as to say “when you take vacation, you best leave the State if you don’t want to get called back in.”
No thanks.
Not that I’ve ever personally experienced it, but the more… “creative” or adversarial style of interview would put me right off. I spend a lot of time at work, which means I spend a lot of time with the people I work with and for. If I don’t even work for you yet and you’re playing mind games and acting like a jerk, what am I supposed to think about what it’ll be like to spend 14 hours a day with you?
On the first call I always ask if I’ll have an office with a door. Even if I’m just doing some sort of short term consulting job I won’t work in a cube so if I discover that’s expected I just tell them I don’t think it’ll be a good match and terminated the interview there. I had one potential employer get really upset at that point and tried to insist that I finish the interview.
Wrong, or misleading job title stated in the advert.
Any job which has to be advertised more than once a year.
An interview that is out of proportion to the job. Many years ago (as per the requirements of signing on the dole) I went for an interview. I went along and was left sitting with an application form - which appeared to be for something high up the ‘food chain’ like a managerial post.
After that I was taken to a room and given what looked a lot like an IQ test.
Then I was interviewed by two people from the supermarket (the manager and someone else) the someone else wasn’t introduced to me at all, and seemed to be there to observe my body language or somesuch…
This was for a job working nightshifts stacking shelves in a supermarket. 
Overly aggressive interviewers. I got up and walked out of an interview for a “Saturday girl” position (ie they only wanted someone once a week, to man the phones), there was no need to start shouting at me and threatening to sack me for the least little infraction. Apparently saying “good afternoon <name of company> how many I help you?” is not how to answer their phones. :dubious:
It may not be dreary any more, but unless Google Maps is telling you there’s a Starbucks, a Taco Bell, and a couple gas stations in the middle of an empty field (because they haven’t updated the image yet), it’s probably still in the middle of nowhere.
Ah, good point, I hadn’t really thought about whether all their data are equally old. <looks> nah, it’s a wasteland.
I’ve been spoiled by working in london for a while.
Employers who aren’t actually interested in internal candidates but have a requirement that they post externally anyway. I know, I know - maybe, just maybe they’ll find a better person outside. But most hiring managers already have someone in mind when they post the position externally anyway. Not applying for those positions would save me a hell of a lot of time.
I also hate it when the interviewer I’m talking to is clearly being dishonest about the job culture. I hate it when I ask, “So, tell me what it’s like working for the company? What do you like about it?” And I get a very generic, “Oh! It’s great!” answer. No, I don’t expect you to tell me that the company is a soul-crushing entity out for your firstborn. But I hope that you’re at least somewhat diplomatically honest, telling me, “This department has so many growth opportunities, though it is a high-pressure environment.”
Lazy interviewers that ask either of the following questions:
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What are your major weaknesses?
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Where do you see yourself in five years?
Anger management.
Prison.
I haven’t been in the job market for a long time, but when I was these things steered me away from various school districts:
- A non-union environment. Been there, done that, it sucked.
- A pay scale with a big jump step anywhere in it.
- High faculty turn-over rate. If they can’t keep people, there is a reason.
I turned down a job at a private military school some years ago. The pay wasn’t great and the kids were all troubled yoots. The reason I turned them down, though, was that the principal/head master/ administrator expected to be addressed as “Colonel.” None of the other faculty or staff at this school were addressed by a military title, just him. I wasn’t long out of the real Army and didn’t believe I could deal with this guy’s fantasies of commanding troops rather than teaching kids.
Buddy of mine once answered “Kryptonite.”
My answer has become: “I’ve been an IT consultant for 20 years and have never done the same job twice, and never worked a contract that lasted more than 2 years. How should I know what I’m going to be doing in five years?”
“What is payroll?”
Actual interview question. Owner of the company. Whose wife had been doing it previously.
My biggest pet peeve is requiring a resume and cover letter, then wanting me to fill out a big, long application that has all of the information on my resume anyway. If you need to know my job history, a description of each job, and skills, and it has to be input into your database by me, why am I sending the resume?
I’m especially frustrated by places where you do all that then you come in to interview and you have to fill it all out again, on paper. I tend to figure that the company either a) doesn’t know what it’s doing, b) absolutely does not value employee time or c) both. Not a good sign.
Some others:
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Having a pre-interview phone screening with a chair-warmer from HR who knows less than nothing about the job and is basically looking for you to psychically know which keywords to recite, because describing your experience is too much for them to understand.
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Going to all costs to avoid telling you it’s a temp/contract job until the very last moment. Look, I live in America. I am single. I need health insurance from my employer. I’m not going to magically forget this fact after the interview; please be honest. I’m just going to waste your time, and you’re going to waste mine.
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Misleading salary. If you don’t want to tip your hat, don’t, but understand that I’m not leaving my job for less money so it’s a good chance we’ll waste each others’ time. On the other hand if you do decide to state a salary, understand that this is not an insignificant thing. If you say the salary range is X to Y and you offer me less than X with no explanation then I presume that you and your company are a bunch of liars and thieves. Waving away my questioning with “Oh, that’s just an example” will not help. Salary range “up to X”? That means fucking nothing at all and tends to also imply that you are snakes.
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Please describe the job accurately. You don’t need to be negative, but it’s only going to cost your company if I leave the job after a few months because your “highly challenging, self-directed, flexible” job is actually nothing but rote repetitive tasks being monitored to the second by the punch of a timeclock. You don’t need someone like me doing that, and I don’t want to be doing it, no matter how much you pay me.
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Adversarial interviewing – aggressive posture, gotcha questions with no right answer, ridiculous logic puzzles that have nothing to do with anything, et cetera. Automatic deal breaker. You could not pay me enough to deal with a company that tries this kind of bullshit when they’re trying to attract talent.
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The interview process doesn’t involve the hiring manager or anyone you’d actually work with. I’ve learned the hard way that this is very bad. I also want to see my work area.
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Vague promises. Look, I’m not going to leave my X dollar salary for X - 30% based on hazy promises of bonuses and future raises. That would be stupid. Do you want stupid employees?
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Job ads that sound like a sales pitch – I immediately disregard them as they always seem to be hiding a huge catch (or a few). Earn up to $100k! … if you cap out on commissions which nobody has ever come close to in our company history, and by the way we pay only commissions. Flexible work schedule! … you’ll be flexible to our needs, not so much the opposite. Great benefits! … free iced tea once a month during a staff meeting.
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Headhunters that pretend not to be headhunters. If you call me in for a “job interview” for a job that doesn’t exist, or otherwise pretend to be a hiring manager, rest assured you will never, ever be selling my services to someone else.
I was coming in to say exactly this.
Also, if the job requires a 150-question personality test, I’ll likely walk.
How about if you work for a contracting agency, don’t spruce up your applicant’s resume for them?
I once went on an interview that seemed to go pretty well. Then the interviewer said, “I see you have experience with Application XXX. That’s great, nice to have but not required.” And I said, “No, I’ve never used Application XXX, but I’ve used similar Applications YYY and ZZZ, so it should be pretty simple to use XXX.” “Huh, it says here on your resume XXX.” I guess the hiring guy saw XXX on the job application and decided that if I needed to have XXX and just added it in. Of course the hiring person didn’t care,
They offered me the position anyway, but I turned it down. It’s not a dealbreaker to work as a contractor, but if the contracting agency is willing to jerk around their client (and their client is the company doing the hiring, not me), they’ll jerk me around without a second thought.
overlyverbose-How can you tell a job fits the category in your 1st paragraph? (just posting because you have to, though an internal candidate has the inside track)
Of course, the online application that requires an hour to fill out field by field, including random mandatory fields for your detailed work history, including exact salary, phone numbers, supervisors, start dates, end dates, addresses, and on and on. Because nobody is ever going to actually look at the information, it shows a complete disregard for potential employees. You’re making someone take an hour of their time on this, for a .0001% shot at a job. It means you have contempt for your employees. For the .0001% shot at an online job listing, you’ll take my cut-and-pasted resume and like it. If you’re calling me in for a face-to-face interview, then I’ll jump through your hoop, because you’re only going to actually interview less than a dozen actual candidates. But a random Monster.com listing? Fuck you.
Right. They’re aren’t going to look at it. They’re going to run it through some kind of crappy keyword or otherwise automated selection process.
If that process doesn’t work any better than the one CareerBuilder is using to send me suggested job listings, then they are missing a lot of good candidates.
I should probably have clarified. I’m actually fairly suspicious of any job listed on a job board, even the company’s website, though I’ve gotten one or two through postings on company web sites. You can’t really tell when they’ve already got someone in mind, but in my experience, a hefty percentage of jobs are posted externally because of HR policy, not necessarily because they actually plan to hire from the outside. But that’s mostly the cynic in me speaking.
Another thing that ticks me off is when jobs that are no longer available are not removed from the website in a timely fashion, so they either stay there and someone contacts you from the company or you get an automatic e-mail stating the position isn’t available or you click the link and get the pop-up that the position is no longer available. What’s the point?