Oddly enough, even though I started working as a recruiter in 2000 and have helped many people find new jobs, I don’t really have any super crazy or bad interview stories that involved any of my candidates.
I’ve heard a number of odd ones though from other people, some of whom were involved in the interview and were part of what made the interview so bad though….
I have a friend who swears that she farted during an interview and was not at all surprised that she didn’t get the job. She even spoke about it on Facebook so I assume it’s true.
Once I had a guy show up for an interview with me wearing a bright yellow suit. The guy looked like he was part of the Kings of Comedy tour except that this was no joke, the guy seriously thought he looked good.
Of course I’ve seen people show up for interviews wearing a suit, dress shoes and white sports socks.
I remember one of my colleagues had a job searcher who showed up to the wrong building for an interview and a guy who showed up one day early for an interview too.
I also remember the story of a guy I’d worked with back in university when I was working a factory job to pay for school. After he’d been laid off, he attended an interview for a laboring job and as part of the interview, he was given some kids blocks (!) and told to assemble them in a certain order apparently to test his reasoning or other skills. Instead he told the interviewer that he wasn’t looking for a job that involved playing with toys so he got up and left.
Perhaps the oddest interview story I was involved with personally was a few years back when a colleague and I were each working on part of a job opportunity with a senior IT guy with a very specific skillset. I was managing the client side (ie. the employer who had the job that was open) and my colleague had found the job candidate that they were interested in. The job itself was a very specific and somewhat rare skill and the guy lived on the opposite side of the country. Due to the skillset being so rare, the company was willing to interview him over the phone and when that went well, they paid for him to fly in and interview with them personally.
They obviously liked him because they decided to hire him at a very high salary and not only that, were going to help pay for his family’s relocation and also pay for him and his wife and kids to fly out for a house hunting trip before they made the move so they could find a house to live in.
The guy seemed like a pretty good person and the company obviously liked him but I remember that when he was flown in for the first interview, he called my colleague from his hotel to let him know he didn’t have a credit card and the hotel needed one to check him in. I thought this was a bit odd – who doesn’t carry a credit card these days especially on a trip across the country – but it ended up not being a big deal and the trip worked out ok.
I recall my colleague saying around this time that the guy seemed like a bit of a country bumpkin albeit a decent enough person who (according to his references) was very good at his job. Remember he lived across the country so we’d never met him, only spoken with him on the phone a number of times and our client knew this. Still, we only knew his voice and hadn’t had the benefit of meeting him in person.
After they agreed to hire him and he accepted, they flew him and his family in for a house hunting trip as previously mentioned. About one week after the house hunting trip which involved him, his wife and his kids flying out for 3 days to look for a house, I get a call from my client saying that the guy and his family had racked up over $2,000 in expenses while staying at the hotel.
In three days!
Now this was a reasonably priced hotel and from memory I don’t think the room cost more than around $400 in total for the three days so that meant there were around $1,600 in other charges!
Racked up in three days!
It included valet parking expenses of over two hundred dollars, and hundreds of dollars in room expenses that were tied to his tv usage. Of course, my colleague and I immediately assumed he must have been renting x-rated movies on pay per view from his room. What else could rack up tv charges so quickly? On top of that, there were hundreds of dollars in food expenses including numerous uses of room service over the three days.
All in all, the bill totalled close to $2,000 and had been charged to the company’s credit card. The company had agreed to pay for his hotel stay and for food but a bill worth $2,000? They weren’t expecting that, that’s for sure.
Now remember that this guy had already been offered the job, had agreed to take the job, and these charges were racked up on the house hunting trip. Talk about not making a good impression on his new employer.
After a conversation with the guy to see what had happened, here was his explanation:
-The valet parking charges were due to the fact that they’d taken the car in and out of the parking lot numerous times during their stay and since there were no in/out privileges, they’d been charged every time they entered the parking. Plus they’d used valet parking which was clearly more expensive.
-The food charges were due to the fact that they were obviously very hungry…and the fact that they had ordered numerous room service trips for their kids. Lots of junk food, chocolate bars and hamburgers for the kids, stuff like that among other things.
-The tv expenses weren’t x-rated movies as my colleague and I had guessed but rather pay per use video games and pay per view movies that they’d rented for their kids using the hotel’s in-room tv. The kids games were charged in 30 minute increments or something like that and the kids had been playing (and thus renting) the same games for hours each day, over and over again.
We ended up getting a copy of the expenses from my client that itemized all the charges and it took two pages to list all of them. Sure enough, it added up to around $2,000 when the room, parking, room service, and tv and video game expenses were added up.
When we spoke in more detail with the guy about how the company simply wasn’t going to pick up the bill for all these expenses he said he had no problem paying the bill and kind of expected he’d have to pick up the tab.
After the smoke had cleared and a few days had passed, I started thinking that he and his family had most likely treated the trip as an all expenses paid opportunity to do what they wanted but when they were told they had to pay the bill themselves for the excessive expenses, pretended like they were expecting to pay for it all along.
Fortunately, the company didn’t change their mind and rescind the offer but what a weird experience this was.
Country bumpkin for sure.
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