World’s worst interviews - Got any more to share?!
March 17, 2007 By: almostgotit Category: anger, interviewing“Don’t burn bridges” is good advice. So is “getting it off your chest.” I wonder how one manages this balance in a no-longer-anonymous blog without getting in trouble? (the applicable blogging term is “dooced”..)
That said, my own personal favorite interview “worsts”:
(1) Members of the interview committee arguing with each other, during my interview, about what they need and want, obviously never having agreed on what they want in the new hire. It was like watching a really horrible ping-pong game…
(2) Having the computer crash during a timed writing test, with no one else around. After wasting a few minutes trying to fix it, I wasted several more minutes wandering around the offices looking for someone else who could. I then asked if having the computer crash was part of the test. It wasn’t… but for making them laugh, I not only got more time, but was called back for another round of interviews.
Amounting, alas, to naught…
(3) Being promised a job and then finding it had gone to someone else. After two sets of interviews, for two separate jobs at The Institution That Shall Not be Named, each of two over-enthusiastic unit directors virtually offered me the job, though later (quite a bit later!) I found out the formal offer had gone to someone else.
Nor does this include
(4) The broken verbal promise of a full-time, salaried position in yet another part of the same Institution, this time made to me by the Institute’s absolute top guy – which was rescinded 7 months later as “never having been,” but only after they’d also got 7 more months of virtually free labor out of me. (Moral: ALWAYS get it in writing!!!!!!)
