Anyone with job interview stories to tell?

That is crazy librarylady. I can think of so many things I would've wanted to respond with.

First and foremost would've been, "So, I'm too smart and too pretty for this job." And then just let it hang there as I sashayed away.

Not a job interview, but I can tell you that as a young attractive blonde I was never taken seriously at first. I was treated like an idiot until I proved myself, at which time my teacher/instructor would act shocked that I am actually an intelligent person. In job interviews I think I was able to convey this well enough during the interview so they could see who they would be dealing with.

I guess I should have worn a lab coat, glasses, and a bun like in the movies.

Now that I am 52, I'm automatically seen by everyone as the one who's in charge and while that's nice, it's also a little sobering (confirming my age) that everyone thinks I know what I'm talking about. 🤣🤣

I had a job offer a few years ago with the county. They called me out of the blue about seven months after the 4 or 5 interviews. It was like 3 interviews, background check (30 pages to fill out!!), lie detector test, psychological tests and fingerprinting.

SEVEN months later they called me over the phone, asked me if I wanted the job.   I asked about health insurance and she told me it was available when I applied (it was not) and I had to answer her on the spot. I declined immediately.

Who accepts a job offer after seven months with no word, no chance of mulling it over, no information on benefits. I even called back the detective that did my lie detector test and explained to him the phone call. He said well that didn't sound like so and so. Then went on to explain to me how much it costs to do all this testing. I was like WHAT??? I did everything you wanted me to and I sat for seven months with no word and then she gives me 30 seconds to decide if I wanted the job. It doesn't work that way. lol

The last job interview I had was for a job with a planning and urban design firm.  My previous boss had quit our firm and moved to this new firm and really wanted me to move over there with him.  He was too ethical to outright poach me so he kept baiting me while we were out to lunch, trying to get me to ask if there was an opening for me.

He finally said, aren’t you curious who is going to do the job you have always done for me?  Truthfully, it hadn’t even crossed my mind.  I was very sad to see him go because we had had a terrific working relationship for the previous ten years, but what the conditions would be like for him didn’t occur to me.  I only knew he wanted to change jobs because he wanted to work from home and our current employer wouldn’t permit it and the new one was all for it.  When he asked if I was wondering about who was going to work with him, my first thought was that he was going to send them to me for training because over the ten years of working together, we had developed a great system.

I asked who was going to do my job for him.  He immediately pushed a card across the table to me and said they didn’t have anyone in their whole office that could do it.  He told me he had talked to one of the owners and he was anxious to meet me.  I expected the interview to be with just that one man that I spoke to one the phone.  When I got there, the board room was filled with 9 people, including my old boss.  It felt like a firing squad.  

I had prepared a couple of notebooks with examples of the system that I had developed to expedite the work product, enabling us to cut the time in getting it to the client by about 2 weeks.  But none of the people, other than my old boss, had any idea of what would have normally been required and they sure didn’t understand the new processes that I had developed to expedite things.  

I had spent months working in my home office and reading programming books to be able to alter Microsoft Word to be able to do what we needed as fast and efficiently as possible.  I had built templates, modified my keyboard to switch from a normal alphabetical keyboard to one of commands only to be able to glide through the work, applying key changes and applying codes to each paragraph so that we could automatically generate a table of contents and have a line in the header on each page similar to a phone book that gives you the information stating this page covers names from X to X.  For our purposes, the headings needed to show what section numbers were included on each page so that someone could quickly thumb through the printed final book and arrive at the number they were looking for quickly.

What I had developed was difficult to understand by someone who was actually used to doing the work, but impossible to understand by these men at the table.  I started out giving technical examples and when I saw their eyes glaze over, I reverted to simplifying it as best as I could, telling them that the advanced programming that I would input would enable their people to make the final product look fantastic and operate perfectly with them just pushing the buttons on the customized drop down toolbar that I would build for each document.  Fortunately I had put a picture of a custom toolbar in my sample book.  That way, no matter how many different people worked on the final document, it would all be identically formatted as long as they were all running the same template behind the document.  That seemed to get through to them a little bit and I was relieved.  

My final comment was that they could lower their production costs by having the project managers and whoever else was working on the document, at any of their three offices, using my templated starter and have the final document look cohesive and eliminate having their highest paid project managers from having to spend a few weeks trying to combine everyone’s portions into one master document that looked as if only one person had written it, which I had learned was their current practice.  And these were documents that sometimes reached up to 300 pages.  I had wished they had brought in at least one project manager who would understand, maybe not how I was going to change their processes, but at least why and what it would do to free up their time and lower their hours on each job.

I could tell they still had no clue how it worked or what I was selling them on, just that I had promised that I could speed up the work product for all three of their offices out of my one office by supplying them with these “magic” templates.

I was sweating and exhausted when I left.  I had never tried to explain a difficult topic and how I was modifying it to people who had no clue how it normally worked.  With that many different people in the room, I was sure there would be differences of opinion on my presentation.  And if I had known who all was going to be in that room, I would have had better examples that would have been easier to understand.  I drove home feeling defeated and disappointed.  Yet three days later, I was offered the job and a salary $10,000 more per year than my current job!
 
I had thought for sure I had flubbed the interview by being too technical, and then too elemental when I tried to switch gears after seeing the looks on their faces.  And no one had any questions for me at the end. I figured I definitely was not getting the job.

lol @zee, you should watch Lessons in Chemistry if you haven’t already.

Ok so, long story short, a while ago a friend of mine helped me get an interview where she was working at the time. It went well and the interviewer took me around to the various depts all of which went by anagrams. There were a few depts that had positions available but she thought I would be a good fit in SPIT. Seriously I can’t even remember what that stood for.

My MO is usually to thank interviewer(s) for their time and information, and ask for the job. But I didn’t ask for the job because man, like, no. 😂

Sooo, later in the week I got the job offer working in, you guessed it, SPIT. Polite as possible I declined. Pressed, I thanked them again and said I just, thanks, but I can’t work in a place called SPIT. thankyougoodbye

Hated to make my friend look bad but she survived

Me: What would your coworkers say about working with you?
Applicant: That I'm way toooo nice. I know I work at Burger King, but my coworkers said I could work at Chic-fil-A if I wanted to!"

..............

Setting - local pizzeria. the name of the restaurant is literally [name] pizza. There is a sea of pizza boxes in his line of sight. The kitchen is open, he can see them tossing the dough and firing the pizza into the oven. all the tables surrounding us are eating (you guessed it!) pizza ....

Me: Do you have any questions about the position or the restaurant?
Applicant: Yes, what kind of food do you serve?
Me: Oh, you mean besides pizza? Well -
Applicant (cuts me off): Oh, you sell pizza?! Nice!

I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, but nope - he was genuinely surprised that [blank] pizza had pizza.

.................

One time I fired a dishwasher and he came back a couple weeks later and applied. His work history? My restaurant, duh. Why did he come back? Well, it had been a few weeks since he got fired and he heard from the guys that we still needed a dishwasher and he was fully available. LOL!!!

We had to cut a family holiday short so I could attend a job interview. I arrived, ready to go, only to be told that the interviewing manager had failed to diarise the appointment, was not in the branch and he had not arranged for HR or his line manager to attend either. I was less than amused. I was eventually called back for another interview. It involved face to face interview, psychometric testing and a presentation from me. It was almost all day, with a break for lunch which had to be taken with the other candidates. Again, I was less than amused. I was telephoned that evening and offered the job. If jobs were not so scarce at that point I would have told them to stick it but I took it. I did not get paid for the first two months because my manager (the interviewing failure one) failed to tell HR my details. He thought it was hilarious until I said I was walking out unless he arranged for me to be paid that day. He eventually was sacked and I got his job.

I also interviewed with a CEO and her direct report. I think innocently the direct report asked “how are your kids”.

Well the CEO makes it clear to everyone nothing comes before work… so she starts to roll her eyes as I’m talking and lectures me on how I need to be at work. I barely took anytime off , maybe when my daughter needed emergency surgery or I had a fever of 104.

I didn’t get the job luckily

I was the one doing virtual interviews for a new program that I was hired to run and there were a few interesting candidates. I had someone who submitted her resume on a digital pink post-it note 🤪, got my attention but not the right kind of attention! The other situation was the guy who was early to the interview and told me that *I* could entertain him while we waited for the other interviewer. I think I said something along the lines of "no, you can entertain me" he also referenced "drinking the kool-aid" when talking about hiring more diverse and inclusive candidates. We're an agency that is built on supporting persons with disabilities! Needless to say, I didn't hire him 🙄

As in interviewee:

1) While being interviewed with my back to the door of a small office with a window next to the door for an internal position, the interviewer just stared out the window while I gave my answers. I always make eye contact with the person asking the question, so that was difficult. I finally stopped mid sentence while answering one question and asked her point blank "Isn't so-and-so going to get the job anyway?" She was so flabbergasted she couldn't answer!
2) I was asked what do I do in my free time. First I thought that might be illegal, but then I wondered if he wanted to know how much I'd ask for time off during work for family activities. I made sure I answered about something my kids participate in during weekends.

As an Interviewer:
1) When I asked "tell me about yourself as it relates to this position" to a candidate he preceded to tell me about a recent ER visit. I had to stop him and explain a bit more about what I wanted to hear.
2) When I asked "give me an example of how you used a complicated formula on a spreadsheet" the candidate simply stated "I can do that."

Being the interviewer sure helped me out with how I did or didn't act when I was being interviewed.

I sat in the lobby for 1.5 hours waiting to be interviewd. Okay, I get it that people get behind, but dang. Sat down in front of the woman's desk and she said, you are over qualified fo this postion, thank you for coming in! Didn't she read my resume? If she had, why did she select it if I was over qualified and she didn't want to take the risk that I might move on from that postion. Grrr!

my husband's company has applicants take proficiency tests for basic software like Word and Exel.  you would be surprised how many people say they are proficient and not have a clue what to do when they are given the tests.  what were they planning to do? fake it 'til they make it?