I interviewed a guy for a graphic artist position who brought his dog with him to the interview and insisted that he be allowed to bring his dog to work; not being allowed to work with his dog was an ‘interview over’ situation. I agreed!
To turn things around a bit, I’ve been the interviewee and a couple of occasions stand out:
- I’m sitting being interviewed and the boss man was going on about something. This is a long time ago so I forget what he was talking about. I’m sitting there and the only thing going through my mind is; 'this guy’s a f*****g idiot.
- Another time I was applying and it was a branch of government. Not really a branch but it was under government (bureaucrat) control. A friend who worked there had referred me. Did an interview with who would be my boss. Went well. Then a surprise interview with his boss, who oversaw several departments but had little hands on knowledge/experience with any of them (did I say bureaucrat). She asked me if I would have any issues working under or taking direction from a woman - her I presumed. I thought, what an idiotic question. Why on earth would I have an issue.
It occurred to me later that maybe that meant I’m not sexist because I couldn’t figure why she would have asked me such a thing, None the less, it was a pretty dumb question. Like I might have respond to the effect that all women should be at home etc, etc.
You might want to specify which kind of job you mean.
I was interviewing for a entry level admin position, and a young girl applied. When I asked her some basic variation of “Why do you want this job?,” she burst into sobs. I had to go get her tissues, it was a full-on crying fit with heaves and everything. She explained that her brother had just died, it had affected her family very badly, and she was trying to get out of her hometown for a fresh start. She didn’t get the job for other reasons too, but I felt weird about it.
I also had an internal candidate who was a very proper older woman. When asked what the biggest challenges she’d faced in her current position were, she answered that one time a coworker was looking at porn on the job and she had to report them. She then went into excruciating detail about it, I think because she was a nervous talker who was genuinely appalled at the situation. It was hysterical.
We were interviewing an internal candidate for a supervisor’s position and we asked him what problems he saw in the department and what he might to do fix them. He answered, “There are too many women in management positions.” The two other people on his interview panel were women, one of whom would have been his direct manager.
I was a classic unskilled untrained interviewer. I’m sure some of them were pretty cringeworthy from the interviewee’s perspective. Whoever you are wherever you are, I apologize for the trauma I inflicted. I meant well, I truly did.
But seen from my perspective a couple real losers stand out.
I’m hiring website developers for a then 10-person startup company. In an outfit like that you need folks, even young folks, who can do the whole job from soup to nuts, and even more beyond those traditional edges. Narrowly focused one-trick ponies don’t make it.
A 25-yo guy comes in. After graduating from college with a relevant degree he’s been working as a “consultant” = temp for one of the big corps in town the last couple years. They use much of the same tech we do and he’s got all the right buzzword bingo on his resume.
So I start asking him about what he does day to day, simple programming questions, etc.
Pretty quickly I discover that his job at BigCorp was limited to attaching the labels to website forms that somebody else had designed, then passing the results onto another dev who made it all work. In other words, in a webpage something like this
First Name [____________]
Last Name [_______________]
Date of Birth [__/__/____]
Street Address [________________________________]
{Submit} {Cancel}
Somebody else created the shape, the input boxes and the buttons. He attached the words, then somebody else turned that into an actual functioning webpage.
He’d been doing this for 3 years straight. Yes he was bored. But it was obvious he’d already reached his Peter Principle. Did. Not. Hire.
I advertised for an office assistant and of course got a bazillion applications. Company policy was that if someone in the company applied, they had to be interviewed, so one person was of that ilk. After narrowing down the apps (tossing the ones done in crayon, etc.) I had about ten people, including the in-house. She showed up for her interview dressed in sweatshirt and jeans and carrying a Starbucks coffee, flopped down in the chair and plunked her coffee down on my desk. So: slovenly (check) and rude (check). Her interview answers were limited to monosyllabic grunts and she clearly didn’t really give a shit about getting the job, or assumed that as an in-house, she was a shoe-in.
So she didn’t make the cut. Next thing I know, I’m getting a visit from the HR head who tells me that the woman accused me of being racist. 
I told her that I didn’t understand how she got that impression, as the only conversation we had was the standard question and answer session. I also pointed out that my department of ten people included two African Americans, one Hispanic-American, three women, and a Native American, none of whom had ever made so much as a whisper of discriminatory behavior on my part. Nothing ever came of the accusation, but from then on I made sure that there were two of us in the room during all interviews.
One of my coworkers was interviewing for a management position. He’s a great person and really good at his job. Well liked, hard worker. But there was no way he was going to make it through the interview process. He couldn’t play the game of giving the required answer when dealing with BS.
First question was from the HR director: What cost saving measures would you suggest for the company? He locked eyes with the HR director and said “I’d outsource HR.”
Another question was “How would you describe yourself?”
His answer:
Trustworthy,
Loyal,
Helpful,
Friendly,
Courteous,
Kind,
Obedient,
Cheerful,
Thrifty,
Brave,
Clean,
and Reverent.
There was silence and blank looks. He said “I’m an Eagle Scout. It’s the Boy Scout motto. It’s how I live my life. Next question.”
He did not get the job, but he is considered a hero among the rest of us!
Nitpick from another Eagle Scout and current Scout Leader: That’s the BSA Scout Law. The Scout Motto is “Be Prepared.”
In the late '90s, I was a manager in the market research department of a big food manufacturer. We were interviewing candidates (new MBAs) to join the department as junior researchers.
One of the candidates was from a very well-respected MBA program, and was clearly extremely eager and career-oriented. That said, the culture at the company was very strongly team-oriented, and we, as interviewers, understood that a big part of assessing the candidates was in evaluating whether they would be good members of our teams.
Every time I asked this guy a teamwork-oriented question, his answers focused, purely, on what he had done. Even when I probed on wanting to understand how he’d worked as part of a team, it was all “me me me.” He tried to present himself as having been perfectly polished for a job like this one, but it was like he wasn’t able to move off of his talking points when I asked him questions he wasn’t ready for.
So, we did not extend him an offer. A few months later, he started calling me (and the other interviewers in the department), asking us why he had not gotten the job. We had to refer him to HR, after he made multiple phone calls to each of us.
Runner-up: during a similar set of interviews, at my previous job, we got a resume from a candidate; at the bottom of the resume, where people will often list interesting things about themselves and their hobbies (to come across as well-rounded human beings), he listed “Personal friend of football coach Woody Hayes.” I guess he thought it would be an interesting conversation-starter, or would get attention if an interview was an OSU alum, but it was just a very strange thing to have on one’s resume.
This is not much of a story because I’ve forgotten most of the specific details, but there’s definitely a moral here. I was interviewing a bunch of people for relatively junior technical positions, and the next guy about to come in had a stronger resume than most, in all the right areas, so I thought he might be a good prospect. It was clear in about five minutes that this was one of the most arrogant assholes I had ever run into. His opinion of himself knew no bounds. Besides the fact that his outsize ego would have been a bad fit under any circumstances, his salary demand was outrageous (we normally don’t even discuss salary at that stage!). To top it all off, on his way out he mentioned that he would require a signing bonus! It was honestly like something out of a Dilbert cartoon. He managed to change his prospects of getting hired from “better than average” before the interview, to “exactly zero” within about five minutes.
My worst interviewee actually never made it into the room with me. We had a time scheduled for the interview, and she didn’t show up, nor did she call or make contact in any way.
About a week later she called me, chipper and unconcerned, and asked when we could reschedule the interview. I explained that I’d assumed she wasn’t interested, since she was a no-show at the scheduled time. “Oh, no, I just got busy and decided I couldn’t come that day, but I’m still interested in the position!”
I politely but firmly told her we didn’t need to reschedule the interview as I wasn’t interested in hiring her. She was shocked and sort of tried to argue me out of it, and was downright sulky when I refused to change my mind.
I’ve had people bring up religious-related things. Like, they spent the prior 3 years in seminary. Or they did some relevant volunteer work. I’m pretty comfortable with that. But inviting someone to come to church?! Wow, that’s beyond the pale.
See, this was an efficient and effective interview. He didn’t want a job that would separate him from his dog. You didn’t want a guy with a non-negotiable dog. You discovered the incompatibility quickly and the interview was over. Success all around. I don’t think less of him for that. He must have known there was a decent chance of being shown the door, but he didn’t want to waste HIS time getting to that point, either.
I worked with a guy who decided one day to share that he didn’t think women should work full time, he thought they should care for children and husbands. He worked for a woman. All the junior staff ended up gathered around him listening to these views, and asking for clarifications. That was an interesting afternoon. He moved on not too long after. (His choice, but he wasn’t a great performer, it might not have been his chioce if he’d stayed much longer.)
At a previous job, I sat in on an interview with a graphics programmer. She was very tattooed, which isn’t as big a deal in my industry as it might be in others.
The fun part, though, was when she asked (at the end of the interview), “So… do you know where I could score some drugs while I’m in town?”
She didn’t get the job. I heard her interview at the studio down the road from us went even worse.
We were interviewing for an experienced Tax Director position. We had a candidate that had flown in late (their flight was delayed) so the originally planned dinner out the night before was cancelled. The candidate was supposed to show up at the office at 9:00 am for their interview.
9:15 and there’s no candidate. The HR talent coordinator, calls the hotel, and get’s no answer.
9:25 talent coordinator calls their work number they had provided, and a receptionist answers and when Joe Schmoe is inquired of, the talent coordinator is informed that Joe Schmoe had been terminated about 6 months before.
9:40 talent coordinator calls the hotel again and is told that Joe did check in, and has not checked out.
9:50 talent coordinator goes to hotel and they and hotel security go to the room to do a wellness check on the candidate. After knocking on the door for several minutes with no answer, hotel security opens the door, where candidate is found passed out asleep in the bed, with about a dozen beer empties scattered on the floor, and an empty pizza box. Candidate rouses, the talent coordinator informs him that he missed his interview.
10:45 Candidate shows up at the office demanding that he be interviewed. Talent coordinator goes downstairs to reception and informs candidate that his interview has been cancelled. He is welcome to use his rental car to drive around the town if he would like, but to be sure and use his return airline ticket to fly home later that day. (the hotel, rental car and airline tickets were direct billed to our company).
11:30 After ranting in the reception area of our building for about 45 minutes, the candidate finally left.
That’s one of the craziest interview stories I’ve ever heard!
The last time I was job hunting I attended a seminar on how to apply for a state government job in California. I never actually applied for any such jobs, but I figured since they’re a big employer in Sacramento I should at least know the process. One thing I was told is that often the person conducting the interview is a bureaucrat with little or no actual technical knowledge. They’ll just have a checklist where they mark off each technical buzzword you mention during the interview. You’re scored based on how many buzzwords you mentioned.
He could have been even more efficient and wasted even less of his time and mine by mentioning his non-negotiable dog in his cover letter, or maybe when I called him to schedule the interview.
Yes, but what he did wasn’t crazy. For instance, you saw the dog, and you presumably had some sense of how large it was, whether it was well behaved, etc.