Your Worst Job Interview

[amcnj]

Well I never had one that I felt was bad for me personally, but one place I interviewed with years ago left me less than impressed. The person doing the interviewing just seemed totally worn out. He talked about the poor relations between management and the workers, and eventually I asked was there any good side to working there. His answer was that occasionally you got enough documentation of incidents to get someone fired. They did call me back, but I declined a second interview!

 

[Cogswel_Cogs]

I had already gotten a position at MCI so I Was indifferent to the job interview. I didn’t bother researching the company.
First question “what do you know/Think about the company?
It was a big book seller.
I answered you make books.
And he was impressed no I researched because as a book club they made approved cheaper versions of books go mass mailings.
Later he asked me why I was looking to leave my present company.
I worked at a public company that was very close to bankruptcy and I reaponded “I cannot tell you why today, I might be able to tell you tomorrow.”
Later he asked me to tell him something outside of work that I did not like.
My dog poops in our backyard and
I said that. Then I realized it was probabbly not a great answer and added that I get home so late from my currrent job that I can’t see it.
He actually commented “Nice recovery”
Go figure I got the job.

 

[mousefan73]

the guy asked me "how do you do it" as I was already working a professionsl job with 2 kids under 3. The implication was clear on how I juggle work and family.. No man with kids EVER gets asked that question.


The country I work it is not illegal to ask personal background questions.. married, kids etc...

 

[Antaniasmom]

I don't teach anymore, but yes. I actually had left vacation at the beach to drive about 7 hours to that interview.

Wow... I never would have left a vacation for an interview. But WOW!! Gigantic waste of time for you...
One time I had just gotten a new job and had finished my 2 weeks with the old job. I coincidentally had planned a week long trip w/ family to Cape Cod and then was to start new job following Monday. We just got into our hotel room and I got a call from one of the doctors (my new bosses wife) asking me to come into the office during lunch to meet the other medical assistants. I chuckled and said, I would love to but I'm actually on vacation at Cape Cod right now. She actually was a little shocked that I could not come in....ummm hello, I'm about 5 hours away..on vacation...not happening. It wound up in the first few days I found out what a living hell it was there but sucked it up for 3 years until I had enough and quit.

 

[design_mom]

My worst one was for an internship when I was in college. I was plenty qualified for the position, but the first thing the interviewer said to me was "I always get my interns from my alma mater [different school], but they're making me interview you. So, I guess we might as well get it over with." It went downhill from there. I answered his questions with good/reasonable answers, but he nit-picked every single one. It was kind of surreal.

When I got home, my dad said "So, did you get it, champ?" I replied, "Well... I don't think so..." It was a waste of time for both of us. He had no intention of hiring me, even prior to the interview.

 

[prprincess]

I interviewed with the school district in my township several years back. The position advertised was titled Communications Manager, but once I got there and the people I met with began discussing the job responsibilities, it was clear to me that they were looking for something completely different than what I wanted to do - someone to run the district's informational cable channel, produce TV segments, etc...more of a multi-media person.

So right off the bat I was disappointed. Then to make matters worse, the Superintendent came in and saw that I listed that I speak Spanish in my resume. She then said she wanted to conduct the rest of the interview in Spanish. I was shocked because the position didn't list that it required the candidates to speak Spanish, but I continued on even though I wanted to run out of the room mortified.

She then complained about my Spanish and said that it wasn't good enough to be listed on my resume--again, I was floored, but I stayed. They then proceeded to sit me in a room on an old, ancient PC and asked me to create a multi-media presentation as a "test". Mind you, this PC had NOTHING on it except Office...nothing I could create/edit graphics with, etc. So I left them with a PPT presentation that contained a few graphics that I had found online, along with some descriptions of what I would really want to do had I the resources, and that was it.

I'm a huge believer in not burning bridges, so that was the ONLY reason why I even bothered to send them thank you notes. But I did put a few little jabs in about how I was not expecting the interview to be conducted in Spanish, and how it was extremely challenging to create a multi-media presentation with none of the usual software. It still makes me angry when I think about it, but I'm definitely glad I didn't get that job!!

 

[RedAngie]

It makes you feel like, why did I waste my time. One of the worse parts is that for a lot of positions out there, there are quotas of how many people they must interview for each position. Its horrible though when they already know who is getting the job. UGH

I went to one interview like that. I strongly suspect the position was already filled by an internal candidate, but they were required to interview outside candidates as well. The interviewer seemed bored and was just going through the motions, left the room for a several minutes, checked his phone a few times, stared out the window, etc.

 

[Dznypal]

not really an interview but I had to reach out to the HR dept while on vacation
I had retired from my job when it was taken over by another company but wanted to come back as pool (filling in for vacations or when there short

sick calls that sort of thing) with the old com after 30 days the com would just change your status--but with the new com I had to apply--some of the process they put me through the back door since I already knew the people and job

I had a phone interview with one of our RPH which was more of a how are you enjoying your retirement then anything but she sent me name up to the next person cause she really wanted me back--I told her we were leaving on vacation that Fri (this was on a Mon) she said the person would get back to me by then-

so Fri comes with no call so we leave on our Med cruise--our cell phone com had a really good international plan so told our kids if any important messages come through to text us

well of course when my DD played the messages there was the one from HR--she texted me the name and number since our phone had 20 cents a minute calling DH said just call them (we were in Barcelona) with the time difference she wont be in the office and you can just leave a message

so I called but got some message in Spanish which I couldn't understand so texted DD to have her call this person and tell her I'm on vacation in Spain and I difenatly want the job and I would call her in a week when we get back

I felt so dumb having my DD calling for a job for me but I wanted her to know I still wanted the job and figured if she didn't hear anything from me in a over a week shed think I didn't want the job

I called as soon as we were home and I told her the fact I felt dumb having my DD call for me but didn't know what else to do--she thought that was a great idea and asked me all about our trip

I was rehired at that point and its over 6 months and things are working our perfectly!!!

 

[china mom]

Not a bad job interview but I didn't realize it even was an interview until later. I answered an ad about a job for a sales position for a new sales department/program. I thought it was an informational meeting only. Well, they broke us into groups and we were group interviewed (I didn't even know that was a thing). Partway through, I realized that this was a pre interview. It went well because I got a call back for an interview and got the position.

 

[rosysubmarine]

I hate interviews where you go in and realize that you're just filling a quota. I had one very awkward interview where one of the people was nice, but the second person giving me the interview was texting the whole time! He barely looked at me! No eye contact, slumped over in his chair and leaning on the table, looked very bored.

Later on I heard that the department was an absolute nightmare to work for, so it sounds like I dodged a bullet with that.

 

[Teresa Pitman]

Here is mine: I applied for a job and got an email back saying they would like to interview me at 8:00 p.m. on a certain date. That sort of worked for me since I was working, and I assumed they must be too busy to do the interviews during the day. But just to check, I emailed the person back to ask if it was actually 8:00 p.m.? She confirmed it. So, I drove over there at 8:00 p.m. The place looked completely shut down - nobody at reception, etc. There was a secondary building where a meeting was going on, so I went over there but they had no idea about job interviews. I went back to the main building, and happened to see the Executive Director coming out.

You guessed it, my interview was supposed to be at 8:00 a.m., not p.m. I was able to show the ED the emails confirming the time. Anyway, they rescheduled the interview and I got the job. Still working there. But I was pretty unhappy about the mix-up.

 

[VandVsmama]

I have a couple.

One interview was for a sort of entry level IT job at an ISP (internet service provider). Interview is scheduled for 1:00 pm. I arrived on time, go to the correct floor of the building, checked in with the receptionist. Receptionist couldn't find the hiring manager. Kept calling him, walking around the floor trying to find him and he's nowhere to be found. She got somebody else to go search and that person couldn't find him either.

20 minutes had then passed and I was really annoyed. The job was just the sort of thing I was looking for. But my time was valuable, too, and I had no intention of waiting around all afternoon. I was in the process of deciding whether or not to leave when 5 min later (so now it's 1:25 pm), the hiring manager comes sauntering in and he snarked at me, "Oh, you must be So-and-So. Aren't you kind of early? Isn't our interview for 1:00?" I looked at him deadpan and said, "Yes. That was 25 minutes ago."

Then he said, "Oh, haha! Sorry. I was at lunch and lost track of time." The guy had spent 2 hours at lunch with a buddy of his. That was a bad start.

THEN we went to his office, which was a pig sty. On his desk he had 2 huge monitors which had a network topology showing the real time status of all of their network equipment in their corporate network. at least a third of the stuff on the chart was red, meaning those were devices that were either DOWN or had really serious issues with them. That was a bad sign, too.

I'd only been out of college for a year when I did that interview, so I still had my college GPA on it (it was a high GPA). The hiring manager proceeded to talk on and on about how he had dropped out of XYZ College, how college degrees were useless, and he didn't see the need for anybody to put their GPA on their resume. He claimed that I would be agood fit and that he's like to hire me and that he'd get back to me. But I knew that once I walked out that door, I'd never hear from him again. And I didn't care. He shoved my resume onto a huge stack of papers on his desk...it looked like he hadn't organized his office in years. He was a jerk. I never heard from him again.

The other interview horror story:
This was at a small to medium sized software company that did custom software development for airlines all over the world. You know how when people book multiple tickets on 1 airline for the same person to the same destination and suddenly you hear about the airline just cancelled the passengers extra tickets? Well, this software company produced the custom software that did that.

Bad sign #1 was when they said that they had no test environment. They did all of their code development on the fly in production on a regular basis. Yet wondered why they had unhappy customers who complained about problems all the time.

Bad sign #2 was that they wanted to pay me an insulting wage for the position which apparently required a certain certification that I had. I said no thanks.

They offered me a job, but I politely declined.

 

[mrsv98]

Its just as bad to be on a "search" committee and know that the board already has the person they want. When I was teaching our head of school retired. We all knew the head of the upper school would be named but no, we had to go through a months long process bringing in all these people from around the country and wasting their (and our) time. In the end guess who got hired?

 

[VandVsmama]

interview horror story #3:

About a year after I'd interviewed at that weird airline software development company, their recruiter reached out to me again. I thought, "Ok, it didn't turn out so well back then, but maybe they've gotten their act together in the past year. I'll go interview them and check them out." I did not expect to get a job offer out of it. I went to the interview anyway just for the purpose of networking and getting some interview practice.

I always go into interviews now with the attitude of *I* am interviewing them just as much as they are interviewing me. You can learn a lot about how a company is run based on going through that interview process.

Ok, so THIS time, there was a new VP head of something or other. Different guy in charge compared to who was in charge the year before. The company had grown as well. this time around, the interview was a grueling 4 hour process. It was kind of brutal, having to be on your A game for 4 long hours of interviews one after the other. The last part of the interview was me (female) with a bunch of men around a gigantic conference table. Also at the table was the guy they'd hired a year ago for the job that I had applied for back then. That dude had a chip on his shoulder and he was a butthead. Acted like he was the expert in ___ when he'd only been doing it for a couple of years and I had many more years of experience over him. He acted like I was a poser or something in my field. Total jerk.

Anyway, the new VP head of something or other was a nice guy. In the group part of the interview, they asked me a series of "What if" questions. "What would you do in this sort of situation?" Stuff like that. Most of the questions were pretty run of the mill and I'd had experience before handling those exact situations, so I was able to answer the questions pretty well.

then there was this 1 question. LOL. The hypothetical situation presented in this question involved the head executives of the national airline of Saudi Arabia. And the project was way overdue on the schedule. AND I'd have to give the customer bad news...that not only were things X, Y, and Z not done, but we couldn't give them a new target date yet. How would I present this bad news to the Saudi Arabian airline?

<background info>
Back in business school (when I got an MBA), I took an amazing international business class that was taught by an American professor who was raised in a small fishing village in Japan. The class was awesome. I learned so much from that professor about how important it is in the workplace to step back for a moment and consider that sometimes YOUR point of view of a situation is not how the other party is looking at it. And maybe something that you are perceiving as being rude (like being late to a meeting) is actually considered normal and socially acceptable in other cultures (Spain, Latin America, for example). Or how maybe it's considered polite to spend the first 15 minutes of every meeting asking about each other's families and stuff like that instead of getting straight down to business.
<end background info>

So when they asked me this question, I immediately thought of that amazing class in business school and all of the stuff that professor used to talk about regarding international business practices. I told the software company people that the first thing I'd do is make sure that at the meeting with the Saudi Arabian airline, that I had a male colleague attend the conference call with me. Preferably a male employee senior to myself.

Needless to say, they were shocked. They said, "But why would you do that?" I thought, "OMG, duh, isn't it obvious? it's no wonder you have customer satisfaction problems here."

So I told them this:
"I think it's important when you're doing business with companies or organizations in other countries, that you really need to consider cross cultural business practices and that we should not assume that the way that we operate here in the US is how they operate at their organization. Social mores here in the US are often very different in some other countries. Take Saudi Arabia, for example. It's a very conservative country in general. Women are not allowed to drive, for example. In general, women do not work outside the home and when they leave the home, they must have a male escort with them. A head of a Saudi Arabian airline might not appreciate hearing really bad news from an American woman. But the message I need to communicate to them might be better received by them if I were to have a male colleague or male superior in attendance with me so when the Saudi company wants to challenge the information or escalate, there's someone else there who they can speak directly with....someone who they will respect more."

The software company VP was really surprised. He said that he had never thought of looking at it like that. All of the other men in the room bristled and you could tell that they were really irritated by my answer.

Then at the end of the group interview, the VP asked about salary and he apologized because he said that halfway through the 4-hour long interview, he realized that nobody had checked with me to ask what my salary requirements were. I told him that my salary requirements were the same as the year before, which were ___. i was too expensive for them yet again. I was really polite about it, said that it was really great meeting with everyone and I had learned a lot about their organization and how they were doing some interesting things. The VP was very apologetic. Apparently he really wanted to hire me. I'm glad I didn't go work there.

 

[soccerdad72]

When I got home that afternoon, I had a rejection letter from the firm in the mail. Next week I got the whole story - they'd already given the position to one of my classmates and just never bothered to call and tell me not to show up for the interview. That would've saved a lot of awkwardness for everyone.

I had one of those - I was a senior in college and our dean got me an interview at a regional firm in town and I'm not sure if they had already filled the position or if they knew they were going to reject me because they were somewhat forced to take the interview. Either way, but the time I got back to school, the rejection letter was in my mailbox (especially impressive, given that it had to go through the campus mail system).

My worst interview was mostly my own fault. I was a year or two out of college and the company I was at was getting bought out, so I was sending a lot of resumes out somewhat blindly. Got an interview at one company that I didn't know much about, did minimal research ahead of time and was pretty unprepared. Unfortunately for me, the interview ended up being with the CFO of the company who saw through all my fluff answers and kept asking for more details. I didn't have much more details - heck, I was a 23 year old kid with one year of experience under my belt (in a totally different industry). It was one of the only interviews I walked out of knowing I wasn't getting the job.

 

[NYCgrrl]

My worst was a cattle call; there were literally dozens of people milling around waiting to be called in for short interviews for a rather high-powered consulting position. I was older than all the rest, and the interviewers were clearly not pleased with my grey hair. It was actually the first time I experienced such overt age discrimination, so it was far more chilling that the subsequent times.

I recently added grey highlights to the front of my hair since there is a large natural clump of same in the middle of one side. I know I earned every one of the middle ones and decided that the natural count was some how wrong. There's something a tad bizarre in a world that doesn't value the experience that older workers can bring.

 

[Domo]

Not necessarily the worst ever, but...

I interviewed for a job in a health food store. I had a total of nada knowledge when it came to health foods. I didn't get the job.

 

[DopeyDame]

My worst interview wasn't with a job but with a PhD program. Within about 10 minutes it was clear I wasn't going to get in - it was a reach to begin with and the interviewer and I just didn't click.
At the time I was teaching a class studying women in science and tech, so I figured I'd take advantage of the interview to test out some theories.
I was also in the middle of infertility treatments.
So I asked point-blank how they handle students who become pregnant and what maternity policies are in place. (I wouldn't ever ask that if I thought I had a chance at the job/position!)
Her response was that I would either have to have the baby in May so I could take time over the summer, or else just wait until I was finished with the PhD program.

It made for some good discussion with my students about ways to make science and tech more accessible for women.

 

[TheIncredibles!]

My worst interview was when I was interviewing people to fill a position. One person who looked great on her resume showed up 15 minutes late ok whatever. We sit down in the conference room and she pulls out a Burger King bag. She explained she was late because she stopped for lunch because I scheduled the interview during lunch time (1 pm)and she was hungry. She then proceeded to eat her onion rings, whopper and shake while trying to answer questions. I ended the interview as quick as possible and she asked if she could stay in the conference to finish her lunch @@

 

[Nakkira]

Wanting to hear stories of worst interviews...

I went on what was the worst interview I've ever been on in February. I arrived 15 min early as always and waited almost 30 min to see the person I was interviewing with due to computer issues.

We were disrupted 3 times during the interview due to 2 calls that she took, 1 was on speaker phone and a patient's full name was said...while I'm sitting there...big HIPAA violation... the last interruption was when 2 girls walked in (her office door was wide open while we were interviewing) and gave her a deposit bag. I kept trying to refocus but not once had I ever been in an interview that was like this. I felt as though she was not valuing my time at all by allowing all these disruptions.

The whole interview to me felt like it did not go well. Secretly, I wished that I did not get the job but I was so desperate when I was told it was mine, I took the position. I lasted 8 weeks before I quit because the place was so incredibly disorganized.

....Always follow your instincts is the only advice I can give after that one....

My worst job interview was for the job I currently have (and Hate)
My interviewer was 45 minutes late. They had me fill out an application after the interview instead of during that 45 minute wait.
The CFO came in a little while later and hadn't even looked at my resume yet so I had to sit quietly while he did that in front of me.

I got the job, and I REALLY did need it but I have regretted it ever since.