Job Interview Red Flags (Reddit Compilation)

what red flags about a company have you encountered while interviewing for a job serious on finding out who had your job previously avoid any of the following 15 people in the past two years one person for the past 20 years they will hate you either way and you will come to hate them depends immo one person in 20 years might indicate that issue retired or is about to retire and will only learn you in so they left on good terms and will be missed but never hated if they ask you to pay a single cent for anything you are being scammed no legitimate job i've had has ever required me to pay for anything necessary to do my job i feel like i should clarify i was referring to employers who require you to buy things from them to do your job not having to buy a pair of shoes or a uniform a small tool set or get maintain a certification i had to buy my safety boots first day at a factory they took it off my first paycheck union job and in the contract got you a free pair every year past the first we pay for 38 hours a week but we expect at least 55 hours as a show of faith and loyalty we guarantee you at least minimum wage our clients come first so it is a condition that if required you cancel leave if directed and attend work with that last one i asked for clarification and was told that if i was about to step on a plane and they called i was to forfeit my plane ticket and hotel bookings and go to work that wasn't even the worst stuff the only time i've ever lost my temper with an interviewer when i went to their website there were way too many statements in large bold font about how much money you can make with few credentials our top performers make over 100k a year no college degree required sign up now i didn't know that strip clubs wanted people to apply online one question i always ask the interviewers is if you had a magic wand and change anything about the company what would you change biggest red flag for me is when different interviewers give the opposite answer no way to i want to join a company in the middle of a turf war cool question i'll have to keep that one in mind after completing the initial interview i did some research apparently the dental company i was interviewing for was owned by scientologists and required their employees to attend mandatory scientology classes also they made me take an iq test which was wholly unlike any iq i've ever taken before if anyone's curious the company is bright side dental went for a marketing company which was selling bulls door-to-door not my style and the ad online light not to mention the man interviewing me was my age 20s and flirted with me asked me if i had a boyfriend and how long i was with him if we lived together etc very creepy and unprofessional desperate for a job i reluctantly agreed to try one day to see what it was like when he called the next day i immediately declined hurried unprofessional creepy worst experience ever interview was rescheduled twice and once i actually got to the interview i found the office was a mess and everything was completely disorganized and during the interview the phone rang at least three dozen times and my interviewer stopped the interview each time to answer the phone in order to give people directions or information about applying for positions had it not been for the phone calls our interview would have lasted a minute as she pretty much asked me three questions and then wanted to schedule me for a follow-up with someone else another day ridiculous on top of all that my interviewer was basically the secretary and practically fresh out of college and seemed him way over her head then to top it all off the position turned out to be temp to perm and it wasn't even the same position i applied for they had several different positions to fill in different departments and when i said i intended to apply for the one advertised she shrugged had an interview scheduled for what sounded like a job i am well qualified for the day before the interview i drove out to the business to see it it has no signage was old and in a run-down industrial area i cancelled on some bs excuse didn't have the heart to tell them what i thought of the place and another potential mid recruit falls at the first hurdle i returned a call from a potential interview asking what time she'd like to meet she started yelling at me barely two sentences in telling me i was an irresponsible little sht i tried to explain that i hadn't scheduled an interview yet she called back an hour later explaining that she thought i was someone else who didn't show up to their interview she apologized profusely and told me she'd love to interview me if i was brave enough owner of the company during the interview i know your last employer had a game room here we have fun by working hard i worked there for two years but i was unemployed when i took the job i interviewed for a fairly high position head of operations for a medium-sized company the owner kept taking business calls while interviewing me interrupted at least 12 times in an hour and made me feel unimportant and he probably would be difficult to communicate with in the future they ended up offering me the position i declined thankfully i found a much better company since as someone who has worked in many crap jobs before finding one i love and then moving on to work for myself they all seem to follow a pattern they always want you to jump through hoops and answer impossible what would you do how would you style scenarios there's absolutely no room for negotiation on salary or your pay they have no idea what you're interviewing for or who you are until they pull up your application the words business opportunity unlimited earnings potential financial freedom ever come out of their mouth seriously don't ever fall for this crap like cutco knives or any of the mlm schemes nothing drove me crazier than answering those stupid but what would you do if scenario questions from my experience jobs worth working for is mostly just negotiating pay during the interview they call you and for an interview because they know you're good at what you do and they're interested they're not sending out mass advertisements for employees because they know their turnover rate is crap what would you do if tom was slacking behind at his position and you were slightly ahead at your position wonder why you hired tom to do that job probably i hate questions like that and it was always jobs that paid minimum wage that would ask me dumb crap like that they always expected you to treat the position like a career and like the best thing that ever happened to you not during the interview but immediately after i joined a small business that charted aircraft but didn't own any he said his business was successful had quite a few employees and i would be their ittech repairing computers running cables etc etc when i got there my first day it was just him and his college drinking buddy who had partied so hard he had developed severe epilepsy i fixed up his systems offered suggestions to replace a server which was an xp desktop hooked directly to the internet with personal info and credit card numbers and text files with the firewall disabled because it got in the way soon as i was done with everything he would let me work on i was suddenly thrust into the role of cold calling aircraft owners to gather their information see if they were available for chartering etc he also had me calling customers during their trips to see how their flights were calling the airport to make sure they knew a plane was coming in half an hour and setting up catering not what i signed up for he also had me dj at his son's birthday party and by dj i mean he bought an expensive mixer and just had me play an itunes playlist then there was the time where i found one of the companies we charted aircraft from was also chartering to one of his competitors with separate clients so he sent them a nasty email and cut all ties for them working with his enemies that's right instead of competing like a regular businessman offering better bids and services he basically cut off his arm by cutting off an income source just because they would charter one of their planes with a competitor instead of him four months in after adding hundreds of customers and aircraft owners to his database he fired me for not being the right fit worst experience ever i sank into depression was unemployed for a couple months and eventually landed a job in a call center that was utter heck however that gave me enough experience to land a real it job so i guess every storm has a silver lining tl dr got hired for it ended up as a data entering dj for a rich prick and his drinking buddy i didn't even make it to the interview i had to make a profile on their website to fill out an online application in the middle of the application i had second thoughts and saved it as a draft to maybe complete later the next couple days involved them calling me four times a day to tell me to hurry and finish my application so they could schedule an interview with me ended up blocking their number and deleting my profile i had a series of interviews by a couple of people over the course of a week not so strange but in what i thought was the final interview the afternoon manager was out because of a miscarriage shame too because it's her second or third one okay that's an inappropriate amount of information about someone that i don't even know so i interviewed with the night manager things went fine after that rocky start until they called with the offer the next week we're offering you the overnight and scheduled position but i had applied for a 0.6 afternoon position yeah but we're also offering 30 less than the job description because while you have four years of experience it isn't with us that doesn't make any sense well i suppose you'll want to interview with the afternoon manager if you are interested in that position should i set that up now i meant to she was out for personal reasons that day and why should it entirely matter who i interviewed with i didn't apply to that other job specifically because i wanted 0.6 fate in the afternoon oh great so you'll take the overnight position no but thank you for all the experience interviewing with you i'll take it on to the next company red flags everywhere i nuked that bridge from orbit interview went fine i sent a follow-up email the next day after a week of not hearing anything i sent them another email asking how it was going their response was oh sorry so busy we'll get back to you tomorrow but they never did every week for a month i'd contact them to see if there was any progress and every week they'd blow me off they finally called me and offered me a job after a month and a half the offer was low and i had already made up my mind that i wasn't going to work for them but the topper was that the hr woman insisted i get back to her the next morning with my answer never call them back if an employer expects an answer within 24 hours but they blow you off for a month that shows how much they value your time they had three statements that they are proud of the mission statement the vision statement the value statement none of them mentioned employees or customers answering a question in a generic way q would i be able to get training to get a professional qualification hey yeah there is a lot of training available we put a bunch of stuff on our personal intranet q how would i progress in this role a the structure of the company is like this so you will start at executive and then move your way up to manager senior manger etc basically non-answers that are not specific i find these are red flags depending what you want from the organization these have all been for very big companies so that could be why it is less specific i interviewed for a job at a charter school one the dean told me how happy she is that she no longer teaches art there and was thrilled to get into admin too the dean told me about several students and the types of mental illnesses they had because they would have been in my class 3. the dean told me the previous teacher up and quit giving minimum notice a field analyst position 1. everyone kept referring to the field workers pain and that they need another analysis to spread out the pain burden annoyance of field workers travel as soon as they started going on with this i was done they made the job sound like half the time it's going to suck so i wasn't interested i was working for a fast food chain in high school college and i would transfer stores as i moved one store held open interviews every tuesday because the turnover rate was so high it remains to this day my least favorite place of employment because it was so dang awful my second least favorite was a retail store for the most part it wasn't hard at all and it could have been a pleasant place to work the red flag was during the interview i was told they provided store credit cards and had quotas to fill i knew that would be crappy but a job's a job it ended up making my job a living heck because besides being morally opposed to getting people sign up for the cards as a cashier the pressure for the quota was unreal not at an interview but on an application one of the requirements for a paid internship was must be able to handle multiple projects in a fast-paced environment from multiple departments with little to no guidance side note as undesirable as it is in a lot of trades being hired as a temp is very very common so you might just have to suck it up sometimes especially in manufacturing at entry in low level positions went in for an interview for a coding position they asked the standard coding questions couple logic puzzles the fizzbuzz code exercise etc then they proceeded to grill me on cassandra the db system facebook created uses a db system i've literally read like three articles on and have never actually used i had mentioned it in passing during the phone interview because they asked if i kept up on new technologies i was later offered a position as a dev dba working on their cassandra db server citing the fact that i knew cassandra existed as the primary reason for offering the position that sounded shady as frick to me and i would probably be in over my head on a system i don't really understand while also being paid considerably less than the position offered due to lack of experience plus i was sick of unprofessional code shops moved to chicago from texas in 2009 as my wife had been promoted and relocated for work i got an interview for an aflac position and rented a car to make it to the site i thought this was good as my previous work position dealt with insurance before and i was familiar with the overall industry as soon as i drove up i realized that this was some low rent building with dozens of other companies and franchises but didn't actually use the office space for work immediate first red flag checked in for what it was worth and was ushered into a room only slightly partitioned from the reception desk and noticed realized there were a couple dozen people there now this was at 9 00 am or so in the middle of the weekend the aflac office shouldn't be interviewing this many people for a position next red flag turns out that this was a dude that sold a flak insurance but was trying to get regular people to do his door-to-door canvassing and to take unsuspecting potential buyers for a ride when i asked him some pointed questions he didn't even seem knowledgeable about a flak or the insurance industry he looked and sounded sleazy he gave few good answers and ultimately kept using the phrases limitless earning potential and you make your own hours given the state of the early 2009 economy most people without jobs were looking for anything they could get this guy was trying to sucker people i loudly got up in the middle of it all made a scene spectacle and nearly shouted this guy out for trying to farm out crap positions for crap pay to people that didn't know his scam that he was lying to people about the pay and how compensation worked he stood there dumbfounded and i again asserted that he is trying to use the effort of the people present in order to line his pockets not help them make money in a stable position no fewer than a dozen people walked out with me but the rest were either too desperate or too dumb to realize a scam when it is pointed out to them i once interviewed with a company eight times each time they were like we really like you but just need one more interview with this other manager engineer just to be sure that was a massive red flag in hindsight also during the last interview they kept asking about whether i was okay working overtime and late hours for no extra pay dodge a bullet there in hindsight the interview i had for my current job should have set off some red flags but i ignored them i don't regret that this is probably the best job i've had the hr guy said i wouldn't be expected to travel off campus for the interview you only need that to happen once before you start asking but tried to call me an hour before the interview started aka when i was told to be on site to see if i could reschedule the shuttle wouldn't get me to the right building in time when i was fresh out of college i probably would have agreed to come back the next day instead i straight told him that was unacceptable i had taken a day off work to be here and calling me at the last minutes to have me come back because he fricked up just wasn't going to fly so a supervisor not the one who was set to interview me drove over the supervisor started the interview by saying he hadn't read my resume and asked me to describe it for him then instead of asking me questions he just explained the systems they use and what the department does i was offered a job like two months later accepted right away couldn't be happier when they try and pull a bait and switch on you during the interview i applied for a programmer job that was looking for an experienced professional someone with five plus years of experience which i had get to the interview and we discuss experience and background what my positives and negatives were they asked if i had experience with a particular programming genre and i replied honestly with no fine everything is okay at this point next i go off to take a proficiency test on my abilities and got every question right except for the one that i mentioned earlier about not having any experience with nothing wrong from either me or the company at this point then comes in the manager owner of the company who wants to talk to me and we discuss my experience salary range etc during which he proceeds to downplay my resume and put me down but wants to throw me a bone by offering me a junior entry-level position in other words they were trying to attract top-level candidates but pay them beginner-level wage so they try to bully the candidate during the interview i respectfully declined the offer and left i won't name the company because i'm a bit scared of what they might do to me if they found out i recently graduated with an engineering degree and was pursuing a job in my field it was a stressful experience so i was understandably excited when a company called me told me they liked my qualifications and immediately offered me a job being the rational person that i am though i asked to visit the company first before making my choice and they tentatively agreed my first red flag was their vague website despite being assured that they were an engineering company i could not even determine what they do from their site it was just a bunch of stuff about customer and employee satisfaction whatever i would learn more once i drove over there i drove to the company and was met at the front door by the employer who escorted me through the security doors the second we entered he made a clear point about not talking about anything i saw there he said it with the most artificial smile i can imagine and i felt like i was being led by a wolf in sheep's clothing nothing could be seen of the work environment from the entrance just an array of tables where the employees took their lunch we walked down a long hallway before i eventually saw what the company did it looked exactly like a sweatshop a pair of armed guards stood before another set of security gates beyond which i could set rows and rows of tables with workers all in identical gowns and face masks hunched over products that i could not make out from that distance i asked if we could get closer so i could see what they were working on and the employer adamantly refused but did do so with that artificial smile on his face he told me i shouldn't look in that direction that the guards wouldn't like it and he reminded me again that i could not talk to anyone about what i saw there that day he led me to a cubicle off to the side and asked me what i thought if i'd like to join i told him i wanted to focus my career on engineering design and he gave me every assurance that that was their line of work it certainly didn't look like engineering work though so i pressed him every answer he gave was the very definition of vague but eventually i gleaned that the company did electronic repairs or something i told him i would think about it and call him he reminded once again not to talk about what i saw there the employer walked me back to the entrance and reminded me one last time to not talk about what i saw while there i said of course but secretly wondered if i should be reporting this company to the fbi you should report them interviewers of reddit what did they say that had you thinking cause the interview you hired my dad tells a great story about interviewing for his dream job at a power plant short version he is one of three final candidates and at the last interview they asked him about something he's literally never heard of in his 30-plus years of being an electrician he told them that he needs to be honest and had never heard of the thing in question and can't answer it at all then a week later they called and hired him he asked later about that question and found out that it was a fake question to make sure people wouldn't just make up an answer and hope for the best because in the electrical world that could get you killed they also said he's the only one that answered it completely honestly by saying he didn't know never be afraid of saying you don't know me so you were made redundant from company about six weeks ago what have you been doing since then candidate i took an evening job in my local pub to pay the bills but have spent most of the redundancy money on training courses here are my certificates and i just passed another exam this morning we hired him he worked for us for five years until we couldn't promote him any further ro i would hire the guy too what's your biggest weakness carbs kid had already crushed the interview and this was just back and forth at the end couldn't keep from laughing he was hired that's a much better question when asked towards the end as i'll throw this at you for fun sort away everyone looks this question up and expects it kinda ruined the point of it i was interviewing a 16 year old guy for a floor staff position at a movie theater years ago i asked why he wanted the job and he really sincerely said i just moved here and i'm kind of lonely the people here seem cool it was so honest and sweet i had to hire him he was a great employee too your hero you probably made his whole year by hiring him she burped really loud reference interviewing for a summer camp position and asked what is your secret campfire talent i've burped loud enough for someone to feel it 10 feet away in a noisy computer room i thought i had enough white noise to cover it and my boss compared it to a call to prayer i was being interviewed in english for a job in germany i asked for it to be in english even though i speak almost fluent german then the question come how good my german was i just switched to german and aced it they looked flabbergasted because i literally moved to germany a few days before got offered the job almost there and then nice strat i asked someone to give me an example of when they had to pay attention to detail and the response i got was when i was defusing a bomb in the military i had to pay close attention to everything i was doing so i didn't kill myself or my team when i first landed in sydney i printed out some cvs and walked around restaurants applying for a job i was ready to go home but i would first pass through an area with lots of venues i went in and found the owner and managers talking at a table and i just walked up to them and said hey guys do you have a minute to talk about our lord and savior jesus christ they looked at me stunned and then i said just kidding i'm looking for a job here's my cv bye i got a call few days later telling me to come in for a trial haha obligatory not the interviewer but the company where i work now always ask a technical question in the interview they asked me for a specific equation and i just couldn't remember it i told them i couldn't recall the equation in the moment but talked a little about a time i'd used it in my previous job apparently my honesty and confidence in handling the situation is what swung it everyone else either had a guess or just rattled off the equation and sat back a guy was retired army he was smart and had good to very good answers for everything we asked at the end of the interview we asked if he had any questions he asked given my work history my experience and the answers i gave you in this interview is there any doubt i can perform well in this job i smiled and thought to myself you confident son of a b my colleague told him we can't answer that but i know i telegraphed it on my face he ended up being a very reliable member of the team they told us this during my out processing class for the air force be professional and ask supposedly makes you look good also it got me a job as well not the interviewer but i know it happened to me because the interviewer told me why i passed it was for a super selective school i was 18 and completely certain i had failed the interview but after several technical questions i struggled to answer one of the interviewers there were three of them asked me in a snotty tone if you can't even answer that why are you even wasting our time i replied this is a school sir i am here to learn if i knew everything already i wouldn't be here the leg interviewer called me on my personal phone during non-business hours to tell me in secret that this line is what made him decide to let me pass apparently all the other candidates tried to appear knowledgeable and they all tried to bulls their way into the school we want students who admit they don't know and honestly want to learn not students who will like to avoid losing face welcome to the school are you kvothe i was told by one of my interviewers he had decided to hire me a few questions in he asked when can you start i had actually worked for the company previously and had resigned because i was burned out of the position i had been in it was recent enough my computer access and annual trainings were current i pulled out my company and said let's get to work i did not end up starting that day but he said that type of enthusiasm and willingness to get in and work was what he had been looking for it happened to me as the interviewee almost two weeks ago i applied for an hr payroll position for a small company while talking about my experience i brought up a taxing issue i had corrected for a previous company the interviewer is the head of hr and pulled a sticky note off a monitor that said state tax issues shortly after i was asked when i could start the moral of the story is it felt like the right fit for both of us i had the skills and experience they were looking for and the company seems like a much better environment than my 10k plus sized company that i'm leaving i did have to give two weeks notice first so i can get my unused pto paid out and finish a project but i can't wait to start monday you had noticed the posted and you keep sews the crap out of them was interviewing for a tech computer repair position and the owner made an appearance for the second interview we spoke about different topics they'd ask me to elaborate on some near the end there were one or two questions that i just couldn't answer questions beyond what i would ever do at that company i think thrown in there to see how you'd handle it i told him that i wasn't knowledgeable in that area but i'd be more than happy to research and construct an answer for him on it he told me later on after i'd been working there for a while that the way i answered those questions that i didn't know solidified his decision to hire me i interviewed a guy who nailed the interview questions and afterwards shook my hand and said sorry for wasting my time as he thought he botched it he left looking dejected but he got the job this seems like a bad idea even if the interview went poorly i just went through an interview process in order to reapply for my existing job through a downsizing all applicants were asked the same set of five questions one of which was to describe our time management strategy and how it's worked for us this company uses the star format situation task action result and all answers are expected to be bulleted out in that exact structure i told a story about my general strategy and applied it to a specific example in our recent work environment where everybody was slammed beyond belief in working 60-hour weeks minimum i got to the result part of my answer where i quoted one of our higher level developers who was talking about me in front of me to one of our senior directors he said hysterical realists sped up our development my interviewer audibly gasped with a huge smile when i dropped that line i got my offer yesterday to keep my job to reapply for my existing job through a downsizing or some work keeping your job but the fact that you had to interview for a position you already hold is freaking bulls when i graduated college my grandma gifted me money to go buy a nice new suit for job interviews i felt the need to prepare a lot for the interview because my grades in college weren't that great and my work history at the time was barely anything i knew on paper i didn't look that good so i needed to be likable and appear knowledgeable i walk into the conference room where the hiring manager was waiting and i was wearing the same suit jacket as him he complimented me on the suit and we laughed about it for a sec luckily i answered the technical questions well but i still think it was the suit that got me that job thanks grandma should have been well this is awkward one of us will have to go home and change and since i'm already here i guess it's you he said describe yourself in one word i said hired as cheeky as i could with a raised eyebrow got a call back on the car ride home that said i was hired not even an hour we do a practical q and a for our interviews every question directly relates to a part of the job we don't expect anyone to get all of the questions perfect we are just trying to figure out strengths and weaknesses our vacancy was for my team and we happen to need someone that can handle working the production support a guy shows up and he had years of experience on a help desk and switched to programming exactly what our shop runs in just from the guys resume i was very interested basically the interview was to see if he was lying or crazy the take-home pretest was perfect the important technical questions were good but what sold me was his story about his most challenging customer the more details i got about this customer the more i could relate to what he'd been through and in the middle of the story i put it together that i knew who he was talking about i had worked under that person 10 years ago i hated them with a passion i was so impressed with how the candidate handled the situation that i was ready to stop the interview right there we hired him and later we ended up trading horror stories good guy and he's been awesome to work with tell more horror stories about the guy you worked for i'm on the autism spectrum so i have worked with voc rehabilitation in the past and currently am as well to assist in finding a job that i can actually work something they do is job shadows it's basically where a job coach pre-arranges it with a business to have you come in and tour the business to see what they do and if you would like to work in an environment like that but sometimes places also happen to be hiring when you go in for a job shadow that was the case with this place it was a framing and design shop i'm studying to be a graphic designer well i go in and meet the owner and start looking around the place and the environment is perfect for me it's quiet and the job itself involves a lot of tasks that i was interested in learning the owner asked me a lot of questions about what i knew and what design programs i knew as they were looking to hire someone who would possess the technical design skills to expand the capabilities of the business i myself being interested in the frame making process asked about many things that were going on in the shop and how they do them by the end of it they asked if i could come in for training two days later and we negotiated pay so i think that was a pretty good indicator i ended up loving that job so much everyone there was super friendly and i always found the work itself enjoyable unfortunately i had to move to another city so i'm now working with the voc rehab in my new area coincidentally i am job shadowing at a place today that again also happens to be hiring wish me luck because i may have a shot to get a job today good luck i know a guy who was interviewing and was being asked some asinine mundane questions by the interviewer and he interrupted her to say look all you're looking for is someone to come in on time not miss any days work hard not make the customers mad and not be and moan about petty things to demoralize the others i can do that he got the job i once hired someone on a line similar to that she spoke in full eloquent grammatically correct paragraphs she didn't have quite a perfect skill match to the job but dang she was smart hired her knowing she'd catch up fast and someday be my boss good for you there are a lot of interviewers who are too egotistical to hire people they can tell are smarter than them happened to me actually and i'm still in shock and have a hard time believing it i applied for a job that i had no professional experience in it's just a hobby that was relevant to the ad i shoot live music for fun and there was an ad for a photographer for a nightclub bar concert venue and i sent in my regular resume and then just forgetting about it i was called in for an interview two three weeks later which i was happy about but extremely nervous i am not very good at interviews and i will admit that i have been unemployed except freelance four four five years anyways i got there at 10 55 the interview was at 11 o'clock i came in shook the interviewer's hand and he told me you were the only one the media team wanted in out of four applicants so you want to come on our opening day and have a go that came as a shock and i was speechless clearly something made them scrap the three others and just go with me i was out of the venue at 1104 the opening day is on the 5th of april and i have been preparing ever since and i'm ready i have no idea what or why i was the only one taken in for an interview i'm still shocked about it and will make dang sure i will not screw this up i'll keep my fingers crossed for you good luck i was hiring student employees at a university and they'd often show up for an interview and be rather plain or hardly interested but this girl showed up with a resume in hand and clearly dedicated to being professional i could tell that she wasn't freaking around i think i told her at the end of the interview that was very probably going to be hired not the interview that had happened to me i was initially hired two years before as a firefighter that was cut due to a hiring freeze during the two-year gap i went to paramedic school and received other schooling and certifications when i came back to interview again i told them i'm a better candidate than when you guys hired me the first time the captain in the interview slowly started to grin happy to take you through my cv but instead i would really like to share my ideas for the future of this team been thinking a lot about what our objectives and strategy should be and how we can make the biggest impact got all these ideas and i would like to share them can i dut she already had a stellar cv so god dang yes please not really a good idea unless you're sure you're the best person they've interviewed last interview of the day the previous candidates had all been out of their depth last candidate came in and could speak at a basic level on the technology networking where it didn't take long to decide i was the one being interviewed for an engineering position in my last semester in college my advisor hated me and was doing what he could to make sure i failed his class we had a lab experiment that involved using an ac powered pump operated using vfd i read the vfd operator's manual cover to cover just to make sure i knew what i was doing i ended up passing his class with a b in my first interview after graduation the company manufactured and rented pumps to construction companies the hiring manager says they just added a dozen portable vfds to their rental fleet i said oh variable frequency drives i configured one for our pipe circuit experiment the interview changed dramatically after that the tone went from an interrogation to a casual conversation about hobbies and travel he then brought me to meet the president of the company and i had a job offer before i left the building i had one interview that i would have choked on if it were not for that fact that i didn't need the job and just took the interview to get out of the office and humor the recruiter the guy was ex-military no-nonsense type which usually scares the crap out of me but i was relaxed and direct and just answered the questions it was the best interview i'd ever given and i knew i had the job and i accepted the offer the best part of this was that i learned so much about interviewing from that one experience it's helped me tremendously in life i strongly suggest people that interview badly schedule a few that you don't need to win to live don't waste a lot of people's time but take some learning time the easiest time to find a job is when you already have one i was interviewing for this job which i get pretty nervous about i thought i was more or less qualified and was doing my best to answer i also have a very distinctive car interviewer asks is that distinctive car yours i answered yes yo that's gonna look great in our parking lot she said that's when i was like wow i really got this or they just hired me cuz my car is cool they actually wanted the delorean for their own purposes even though i avoided management roles i used to get called on to sit in on interviews in the places i worked all the time anyway we were interviewing for some software developer role the candidate was a lady just returning from maternity leave her answers to the technical questions were so so at best but i could sense there was a good brain in there her answers were thoughtful but leaned more towards the big picture project view i asked her if she had any interest in program management as i knew another team had a position open there she replied it was her dream job but she was having difficulty finding positions because of her time off i left the interview and pulled in some senior people from the other team and the interview shifted 180 degrees she got the job i heard she cried a little you are one really awesome dude lady this was in 1999 i was interviewing for a entry-level programming position at a.com after the first few questions the guy asked me what i used to program in i said notepad because i didn't like softwares assuming what i wanted to type he stopped the interview and hired me on the spot i love how that worked in 1999 what a different time these days not using an id shows ignorance and inefficiency because who in their right mind would use notepad to code not an interview for a job but for a special tdy program with the military i was a couple weeks from getting out of my advanced military training being one of the top out of my class i was interviewed by my one sg and commander for this position they would only accept two soldiers and there were four of us interviewing during the interview my commander asked if i was comfortable p in the corner of the room i am a female i know it was a hypothetical question to see if i'd be comfortable in the environment of the program but i answered right now because i can do that the look on his face told me all i needed to know a friend was interviewing a guy for a sales position friend handed him a pen and said sell this to me he takes the cap off the pen and starts telling my friend about all the features of the pen then he says i'll tell you what if you buy the pen i'll throw the cap in for free cliche questions get cliche answers i used to run 10-15 interviews a day usually applicants see others in the lobby there was one guy that saw me making coffee on his way in he walked straight into our break room and introduced himself he recognized me from our company website in my mind he was hired on the spot his qualifications were on point and he became a valuable member to the team my dad has a good one he left business school and wanted a few practice interviews at companies he'd never work for think large investment banks with loose morals in one of these interviews he was asked why he got a c in a class he responds because that professor was a freaking [ __ ] they offered him the job on the spot this sounds like an answer from a volvo wall street backstory i love it interviewee actually i was interviewed for an i.t position at christian charity that supported individuals with disabilities it was the first full-time i.t position in the organization's history he asked me what difference would it make being a christian in i.t i told him god loved open source software and decentralized networks that empower all members of the kingdom to share their gifts he laughed out loud and said well well i didn't actually think there was an answer to that question i was pretty sure i had the job right then god loved open source software put that on a t-shirt i was interviewing a 19 if old young lady for a car sales position i asked her why she wanted to work for us she said in sick q and d tired of relying on my husband for money and i want to make my own money and a lot of it and i heard you guys pay well my response can you start tomorrow not as impressive as others here one where i was interviewing i went job searching and kept hearing this sales manager on the radio pitch how great it is to sell radio i couldn't get my resume noticed and wasn't getting any call back so i walked into the radio station and told the receptionist i had a meeting with mr vp i walked into his office and said i am here for the sales job he looked up and said did i call you for an interview and i said no then why are you here i said do you want a salesperson who waits for the door of opportunity to open or the salesperson who opens the door of opportunity for themselves ended up getting the job offer but it was a completely crap offer and after doing more research on the company i discovered they weren't even making enough revenue to pay their bankruptcy payments interviewing for pt salespeople for a retail company that sells sex toys posters banned shirts drinking games and pot related stuff i had no office so i was interviewing at a table out in the open this kid walks in he is my tenth interview in a row i'm hungry and i freaking need a cigarette i think hey muff take him outside and interview the sun will be good for you so i ask him if he minds if we go outside to interview he's all into it probably because i'm a super cool person and he wants a job on our way i'm totally needing a smoke so i turn to him and say hey do you smoke he says cigarettes i look at him and say so you smoke weed he looks at me like i just fired him and stutters no man it's a i cast him off and say it's cool but remember the only people who need to clarify what we would be smoking is a stoner he just stared at me dead died i could tell he thought he ruined his chance at the job i said dude chill unless you totally freak this second part up i'm going to hire you pot smoking was a bonus he ended up as my assistant manager years later hiring managers of reddit what red flag did you miss or ignored during an interview that ended up costing you later i actually hired someone who was late for the interview her apology was totally reasonable and i looked past her because she seemed like a good fit a few weeks into the job it came out that she didn't know what time zone we were in that's not the reason she was late but it did turn out that her understanding of time and clocks was insufficient for a job where scheduling things across time zone was a primary responsibility comma her understanding of time and clocks was insufficient oh man that's got to be one of the best phrases i've read in this thread without getting in specifics other than three years litigation on sexual misconduct by the entire staff we finally got the state government to allow us to put must be comfortable in a work environment that has open discussions of sex and drug use for a position in the hiv std prevention one applicant had this weird sort of arrogant body language during the interview but because they looked great on paper and otherwise interviewed okay i wrote it off as anxiety or something jokes on me because that person ended up being the whiniest snottiest bitchiest most vile individual thank god they found another job before i had to let them go this is going to be kind of a left turn but the threat could use a bit of positivity when i was working for my stepdad's trucking company i did a little bit of every part of operations dispatch finding new accounts hiring and firing it was just a matter of who was available at the time to do the task one day a guy comes in asking if we are hiring drivers i inform him that we are and ask him to have a seat while i grab an application he stops me and says before you bother with that i have to ask a question that could save us both some time do you hire felons to which i replied it would depend on the felony voluntary manslaughter oh crap come to find out the guy had done a 10-year stretch in the state pen some guys tried to rob him he shot one in self-defense there was some [ __ ] with witnesses dude couldn't afford an attorney public defender talked him into plea bargaining down to manslaughter so he wouldn't do life he had his case file with him i glanced through it while he filled out the application sent him for a p-test same day he was one of the best drivers we ever had he was where he was supposed to be when he was supposed to be there never bitched never caused any problems model employee i'd hire 10 guys like that in a heartbeat literally the opposite of the question but upvoted because the world needs more people like both of you a couple of 17 year old boys were dropped off by their father in a compact red porsche convertible not that it's relevant with frozen yogurt cups in their hands the older one walked up to the desk and with freaking froyo in his mouth asked can i get an application the brothers spent almost half an hour eating frozen yogurt laughing and joking with each other and filling out that application in our lobby it was maybe a five-minute application when they handed their applications to me i took them the applications not the applicants back to our brand new ho lady and laughing told her about these kids who were obviously only looking for jobs because daddy made them do it i pointed out a sticky thumb print on one of the applications it was funny to me and she laughed along with me she hired both of them on the spot before that point applicants were required to have a minimum of three years experience in whatever field they were applying for or neither of these kids had ever had a job before that place went downhill rapidly under that hr manager because she would just hire anybody she liked which meant she only hired attractive highly extroverted teenagers those two boys and just about everyone else that woman hired were terrible old parking management company hr i worked for over a decade ago just flat out ignored the second page of applications where criminal history declarations are for six months eight people got hired to work in private condo skyrises where the general building master keys were in the same cabinet as resident car keys who had felony sex offender convictions when the district manager found out she fired every person involved in the hiring process and moved the eight to her parking lot i'm lost how does sexual felonies and cars add up not a hiring manager but every time someone brought up in an interview what's the fastest anyone's been promoted here i want to break that record they end up being duds go to get promoted so they can answer to a new boss before this one realized how big of an idiot they are hired a guy because he reminded me of my good friend who was addicted to oxycontin turned out the guy was addicted to oxycontin not a hiring manager but i was a very precocious young engineer when i was 27 i was hired as a junior engineer on a project three months later my boss who was a great mentor was transferred to another project overseas for some reason his bosses decided i was ready for his job they promoted me and my first task was to hire a replacement for my old job hr sent over a pile of resumes that had already cleared their first hurdles i interviewed several people and found the perfect person he had experience in everything we wanted and his experience in the field was with projects very close to ours he was prompt punctual and seemed very sharp and able to come up with workable solutions to problems very easily even though he was almost 50 he seemed to have no problem with the boss half his age and in fact suggested i must be wicked smart to be so young and in charge of such a project as i was i suggested him four hour hire my soon-to-be former boss talked to him and agreed the head of the department agreed hr said his credentials and everything panned out and they saw no red flags he was hired he signed all the papers and filled out the w-4 and we set up his desk and phone and let him know about the friday afternoon contractor meeting and all that crap when he informed us he couldn't work friday we said no problem we understand if he made plans for this friday before he took the job no big deal there's next week he said he couldn't work any friday he explained he was a messianic jew a jew for jesus and his religious views prohibited him working friday through sunday this was the first i had heard about this nobody else saw it coming either we checked with hr who talked to the company lawyer the lawyer advised that doing anything could open us up to a religious discrimination case the lawyer said we should have asked in the interview but isn't it illegal to ask about religion in the interview two you ask yes we should have said we expect you to work monday friday 8 a.m to 5 p.m with an hour for lunch can you work those times in the end it wasn't a big deal the guy worked longer shifts monday thursday and basically did five days worth of work in four days there were a few times we wished he were there on friday so he could clarify something he had done for the meeting with the building contractor but overall he worked out fine for me though it was a learning experience nevertheless sounds like it worked out not a hiring manager but was evaluating applications for a position one candidate gave some very thoughtful insightful criticisms of his current workplace we appreciated his candor and the content of the critiques were perceptive when we hired him we realized that while he spoke well and appeared intelligent all he could is criticize everything even when his criticisms made no sense we started to see him complaining about the same things with us that he complained about in his letter even things that were objectively false like our vocation policy being used or lose it which it literally wasn't immoral a good candidate will find ways to frame criticisms in a positive forward-looking way in a cover letter not complain about their current employer sounds like a corporate version of the date that won't shut up about their ex company hired an arrogant individual who had issues everywhere he worked both with co-workers product and policies supervisors and customers when i brought the issues up with him he seemed okay and when i left he called up a management crime he said i had offended him and was a racist this was relayed to me and we had a beating with upper management i begged my manager to get hr involved and either look at me and see if i was racist or if he was full of it they did not get hr involved and told me to try my best to train him up i gave it a try and failed to get any buy-in or progress i ended up leaving the company via headhunter for greener pastures and after i left they transferred him to another location because they put a more inexperienced person than myself he is now at another location doing the same thing i have a friend with the old company and that dud of a worker has called for different people racist who have brought up his performance i don't know how folks like that keep jobs disruptive and zero effort in any tasks the hiring manager apologized to me when i was leaving candidate for supervisor position was asked about a time when they had trouble completing a task i hate corporate interviews candidate mentioned something they struggled with but the answer was that they found a way of completing the task that worked for them and did that going forward so we kind of take that to be a big positive for thinking outside the box and being able to solve problems independently using the tools available to them now this was a preferred candidate so we didn't do a lot of deep digging questions around the standard questions we were required to ask by corporate fast forward and candidate is now supervisor we have a team of about 12 there is an opening checklist and a closing checklist supervisor struggles with learning tasks on checklist no other team member has issue with tasks on checklist as it literally writes out what buttons you need to press a supervisor concludes that checklist is poorly done since they cannot understand it proceeds to make changes to checklist master documents to the way they feel it should be done and chaos ensues now we have supervisor that understands checklist about three four that just press the buttons and the rest of the team is now lost on top of this manager checklists have tasks that can only be done once staff has done their tasks as a result of some of these tasks being removed from the checklist manager tasks are no longer being done on time and everything is thrown off when coached on this incident supervisor did not ask trainer teammate or manager about how to understand the checklist and just made changes without communicating this to rest of the team we did thank supervisor for being proactive but then worked as a team to make any necessary changes but used the original as a template but we also did some extra coaching on what they didn't understand it took a few weeks to get everything back on track though and our scores took a hit as a result supervisor was up for manager position at another location supervisor puts on their resume revamped morning evening checklists for improved team performance couldn't help but chuckle at that one oh man some people can tell themselves whatever they need to hear i didn't miss it my boss did and it's something i pointed out multiple times during the process this was maybe five years ago so for context my boss was not a very good manager and yet he was the director of our team he had a good work ethic a good head on his shoulders and always got things done not only well but on time he was rightfully rewarded for it all that said he possibly has the social eq of a fish in my industry you need a thick skin and the ability to kind of bulldoze through crap people whatever it's heavily rampant with scumbags fraud etc and it's why we get paid well we're capable of navigating through that crap and saving making our companies a lot of money in the process this guy that we were interviewing just didn't feel like a personality fit during the phone screen immediately after the call i tell my boss that i'm a no the guy isn't just going to get run over by our industry but our own freaking team he sounds like a great guy but just not a fit i get told to give him a chance then comes the in-person interview it's basically all confirmed super nice dude i would love to manage him in any other scenario but not here he just doesn't have the personality trays to succeed in our environment which was admittedly not a good one boss tells me don't worry makabra we can fix him the freak first of all there's nothing to fix his personality isn't crap it's just not right for our job two you're not the one managing him i am the dude ends up accepting our offer honestly i love the guy he's so friendly earnest and worked really hard because he saw the gaps in his skill sets from where he was and where he needed to be but it took a giant toll on him and eventually me the guy ended up being diagnosed as clinically depressed he hated the freaking job and i was nowhere near experienced enough as a manager to handle something like that when he was at his wit's end i just told him to take a break start with a vacation so that he's paid and then decide whether or not he wants to leave afterwards take care of himself and to utilize me in any way he could for future prospects outside of our work tl dr my boss inability to judge personalities literally sent someone over the edge into depression i used to do hiring for a small store and the biggest red flags were too good to be true candidates who claimed they loved the public never had any problems with co-workers and were never late or absent invariably caused the biggest problems because they were lying through their teeth we hired a guy a couple weeks in he got comfortable enough around me to open up about a warrant out for his arrest for sexually assaulting an underage girl and not going to court for it he felt pride and sneaky when telling me this i could just tell had a smile and everything not cool especially since i have three underage daughters told my gm got my boss chewed out kinder more like learned a lesson did we build more importantly got his butt fired and arrested on the spot for his next shift felt good good for you i saw a similar story here a few weeks back and the guy caught a lot of flak for turning in the co-worker it was a maintenance type job which would have had the creep entering people's homes you did the right thing oh boy this one happened last week hired a guide to be a seller of cannabis products for a new dispensary i'm about to open he was eccentric to say the least he has tons of experience as a salesman and definitely knows his crap in the interview he got a little bit douchey about his salary and health benefits this is the second interview salary and benefits were to be discussed with the owners on the third interview we told him this whatever we hired the guy gave him his ideal salary plus commissions plus benefits the whole package first day he started giving me orders and asking where does he rank on the chain of command i tell him i'm his boss and he doesn't like that so much whatever then he started giving out candy to all the females in the office and telling them i was thinking about you have some chocolate i told him that wouldn't fly here and he should call it he told me he was a social butterfly and that i was uptight this was all during his first week whatever the very next monday his sixth day on the job i get called into the owner's office with the head of human resources and they straight up asks me what i think of the guy turns out all of the females that got the candy from him felt heavily harassed dude barely lasted a week on an awesome job because he was a social butterfly what a freaking [ __ ] so about this job not so much any specific thing or any specific person but don't ever settle for the least worst applicant when we have an opening we usually have hr screen the applications for basic requirements then i go through anywhere from a dozen to 40 applications resumes i usually do a phone screen on half a dozen or so then invite the best three or four in for face-to-face interviews with me and the team every single person we've hired based on well they were the best least bad of the applicant pool let's go ahead and make them an offer versus wow i really liked her she's going to be awesome i've always regretted hiring the least bad applicant i've learned my lesson that hiring the least bad applicant instead of someone i'm really excited about never works out in the long run it's much better to keep the position open a few months longer or even close it wait a few months and then open it again instead of feeling rushed to hire a warm body because they floated to the top of a mediocre applicant pool very true it sucks in the short term but it beats having to hire for that position again a few months later i and one other of the hiring panel called it out but our boss felt desperate for hires and pushed it through regardless i worked in a massage clinic this was for a therapist position let's discuss the red flags boss lady ignored applicants showed up in daisy jukes and rain boots and a stained hoodie she had a long history of drug abuse no judgments at just that who had gotten fired for shooting up on old work premises six weeks prior she was a non-stop talker during the interview massage working on me and others so we can see what clients would experience she invited me to her wedding in three days and said that because we would be her new family we should all be there shereek of six which is a big no-no in the industry confined close quarters means no sense good bad or otherwise her fingers were the worst offenders and my hair and face smelled like nicotine for the rest of the day and every time my hair moved i got a new whiff but the biggest one was that she completely on her own admitted to having used doctor's notes in the past when she was on benders i and other hiring girl we had a panel of five including boss lady which is way too freaking mena but alas brought up our concerns we were told she's sweet and needs a leg up which i'm all for but when there's red flags of fake doctors notes and recently using on the job it's a big issue in our state we are on the fringe of the medical community but we are still a part of it so that's liability after liability right there we had a therapist cause a seizure in a client by using essential oils not approved we got sued up the mother effing yin yang using on the job and something happening to someone means the clinic closes big deals well what happens luckily no lawsuits but she started stealing and using again she called out constantly but always had doctor's notes so she couldn't be fired she even got a three-month note written for a work injury i saw it happen and literally nothing happened but we didn't have cameras and my word wasn't as strong as a doctor she got wind we were trying to fire her so got a note to return to work on light duty for another two months so she could basically work as much or as little as she liked and couldn't be fired every time she was done for the day we would have to cancel all her clients if we didn't have other therapists open it took 11 freaking months but then she was asked to take an extended leave so she could get better which she did for three months and then she tried to apply for unemployed benefits which during her paperwork she fricked up and got caught trying to double dip on the company's dime so she finally got tossed she worked maybe four full weeks of work during those 11 months yep we sure needed her she really contributed boss lady deserves all the headaches over this higher but the rest of us in middle management didn't deserve to deal with it people who speak in superlatives rather than answering questions directly turns out the guy while super excited to work for me really didn't understand the role i ended up firing him the last day of his 90-day probation period despite spending an enormous amount of time with him trying to get him right ran a grooming shop with my ex-wife we hired this lady who seemed a little high-strung tweaky actually but we needed the help some customers swore that they recognized her from a while back at another shop but she denied ever working there and seemed oddly defensive about it but one night we found reviews on our yelp page from one of her neighbors who she was fighting with the neighbor specifically called her out in the reviews and spilled about how she was responsible for the death of a customer's dog she walked away from the table for a break the dog fell with the harness around its neck and hung we fired her immediately for lying to us and bringing her drama to our business oh my god i called the guy's previous job who he had written down as a reference his previous manager female explained to me how he was a great employee but his girlfriend was freaking psycho and how she waited for her after work one night and jumped her which is why he was fired he explained how his manager actually had a crush on him and when he quit she began making up lies not only did this not make sense it was a red flag on top of the red flag that he put her down as a reference at all we were hurting for employees so we hired him his girlfriend was crazy and i have many fun stories from the five months he worked with me do share harder guy said he knew electrical we're a low budget reno company specializing in flipping dumps seemed like a hump to me but he started wiring the outlets fast i watch him for a bit and tell him to watch for the traveler on this one switch but it seems like it's all good so i move on get back half a day later and he hasn't moved on from this switch he'd wired the traveler wrong and when he flipped it on i guess it was live the breaker blew i set the breaker and it blows again i ask about the traveler yeah he did it right we pull the switch apart nope right in the hot and you know what crap happens i'm a little mad it took six hours and me watching him that he started backtracking his work but i figure everyone gets a first day pass but then he starts to blame the other workers they all tell him to frick off and then he starts to blame the evicted tenant he must have snuck back in and switched it around i told him to pack his crap and go and spend the rest of the evening doing it myself comma blamed the evicted tenant i too lose sleep over the thought that somebody might have properly rewired my old home not a hiring manager but i recently worked under a supervisor who had been out of the industry for several years but was trying to make a move back in during his interviews he apparently directed his answers only to the men in the room even if the question was asked by a woman they hired him anyway and once he started he refused to work with the women on the team even though they knew more of the industry since it had changed quite a bit since this guy had left thankfully he was let go about a year after he was hired oh oh i got one we had two interviews our interviews on my workplace were weird we would have one hiring manager one guy from the floor one supervisor and then one female i was the female the first guy comes in and is very sloppy dressed his outfit wasn't that impressive and he stuttered a lot his looks weren't that attractive either i wouldn't call him ugly and he was teeter-tottering on the line of unattractive his resume there was holy crap impressive as frick work history references from all his previous jobs mostly management the skills we need and then some this guy could code animate fix design and you name it he can do it we do the interview and despite all awkwardness aside his resume was his one saving grace enter guy 2 this guy is a knockout dressed beautifully wearing cologne hair swept back a smile on his face and very very sociable everyone was impressed by him his resume however was not impressive he was fresh out of college only work experience he had was at a best buy and a costco his references were all family members which is fine but this is immediate family his skills were lackluster at best he only put could code in javascript or something like that everyone else was impressed by him on looks like alone we decide to give these two a final test the first guy passes with amazing colors and we ask him if he would like to add anything to his resume for documentation etc he gave us a list of volunteer activities and a list of notable achievements we looked it over and were impressed again mostly because he did a lot of stuff raising money by playing video games one boss was impressed second guy finished the test and just said he has a good feeling about it walked out without anything i'm sure you know where this is going we hired the second guy i lost the vote three to one and the first guy was told he was put on file two weeks later things in the office go missing people are more stressed as heck and what's worse is that we all think it's this new guy yeah it was he was a womanizer and we all grew sick of his jokes and attempts to pass off his work onto us because he would say i know you by owing us he will take one of us on a date and desperately try to get into our pants a sexual harassment suit later and he was canned we tried calling the first guy but he already found another job at a better company a job i would later move to that sucks for the first guy but i'm glad he got a better end job and you did too hiring managers of reddit what are some telltale sign that your candidate is making things up well i was testing a potential welder once he showed up in shorts muscle shirt and flip-flops to do a weld test and interview i turned him away citing safety concerns about his wardrobe and never rescheduled figured he was too dumb for me to deal with having interviewed quite a few candidates i've come to accept that many many people will try to bs their way through something they have a dabbling knowledge in but that's all right when i ask a direct question and the person is trying to work it out on the fly to come up with an answer that sounds correct i get some great insight into their troubleshooting abilities this only works if you know what it is you are talking about though if you've never heard of ansible please don't try to tell me what a great database application it is at the end of the day though my favorite answer and the one most likely to get to candidate with limited experience on to the next phase is to just admit you don't know but that you'll look it up google it and be able to answer the question next time most recent candidate we hired did just that i passed the question i'd asked them on to the next person to have time to do the interview and they were asked again they must have had the right answer this time because i'm training them now i speak enough gringo spanish to get by and back in the day when i was a hiring manager if anybody put fluent in spanish on their resume i'd walk into the interview room and introduce myself and start the interview in spanish the looks of panic from the kids who'd taken like three years of high school spanish before college were priceless when you're doing a video interview and you can watch them try to google stuff in the reflection of their glasses small props for being clever though he was paraphrasing the question back to me as a way to use a voice assistant guess i'll wear contacts next time one woman i interviewed literally took a pause and read the answers to the questions straight off of google online skype interview i noticed it because there were really weird pauses and googled it myself and literally followed along like subtitles as someone who has hired many technicians in it positions i'm amazed at how many people would fake highly technical knowledge i remember i needed a telecom engineer with very specific knowledge of a very specific voice system i was getting suspicious of this one candidate so i started asking about the exact syntax of command lines and this guy was actually throwing out made-up commands i was both fascinated and annoyed my last dev job i was asked how much i knew about a certain variation of sql i've been a strong sql guy for years but haven't used this type i just said yeah i haven't used that but i'm a top notch googler got the job in part because i appeared truthful maybe more of an answer about general competence but in my observation the smartest people are comfortable saying they don't know something or acknowledge limitations in their knowledge or experience naive or bluffing candidates want to project an air of knowing everything which is implausible another signal is how eager they are to go into depth i interview programmers and technical staff so i like to ask them about the project they are most proud of i listen carefully and ask a few questions about how they work through some thorny tech aspects i understand that software is a team effort but the legitimate contributors are eager to talk about technical details of what they built are the ones who just attended meetings and rarely contributed much struggle to say anything of substance that is quite telling in my view most of my projects were always pretty small scale because the companies i've worked for were extremely cheap a lot of the time it was really just talking about said project but when the cost actually factored in the said projects were never greenlighted we had an interview candidate who said their excel skills were 9.5 out of 10 inches and they knew how to do pivot tables they literally started crying when we brought out a laptop for the skills test and asked them to make a pivot table out of sample data we had someone come in and interview for a call center position their resume claimed they had three years working in a call center in town when she arrived she was very lethargic and couldn't answer basic interview questions when asked what she didn't call center a she literally just said call center rep when asked to elaborate on her duties she repeated the same thing no details were given she even claimed that she has never been asked such hard and detailed questions during a job interview before we didn't make it past three very basic questions we have concluded she lied about working at call center a or at least she certainly didn't work anywhere near three years there it was probably three days which was like three years to her i work at an architecture firm and i kid you not a candidate attached one of our projects in her portfolio exactly same 3d rendering it wasn't even listed on the company website how she got it is still baffling the hiring manager just played along a common one i see a lot is work history that is grandiose and excessively over qualified especially if it's difficult or impossible to verify i am in a high immigration city and deal with lots of international candidates and have met a vast amount of people with titles like executive director of worldwide distribution or senior vice president of global operations from a company in bulgaria or cambodia or dubai with no phone number or english website the position descriptors and skills on these resumes usually look copy and pasted from a template and additionally these people often claim master or doctorate level educations that are equally difficult to verify i have had more than one cfo interview for an entry-level position who had never seen a profit and loss statement before some places do love inflated titles though one of mine was director of imaging department i taught people how to use a scanner it's ridiculous i don't see a lot of things people are totally making up but it's easy to spot when they are heavily embellishing work history it's totally fine to have worked in a restaurant or retail store i'm hiring for entry-level professional positions so you expect that kind of work history i'll take your app a lot more seriously if you focus on the customer service aspect of the job and don't try to make it sound like you the cashier were running the place handled financial transactions for a multi-million dollar company mcdonald's cashier at a job fair i told people that we were doing a lot of work in the programming language battle rave and asked if they had any experience with it a disappointingly high number talked about using it for classes in college and writing some side programs in it after they heard about it and so on they must have felt silly later when they googled it and discovered that there is no programming language battle rave i just made it up as a way to tell who was lying to me for some odd reason as someone who has only done super basic html in college classes i am really happy that the moment i read battle rave my first thought was that sounds like bull's lol not knowing their resume is always the biggest tip-off it says here you know apache can you give more insight into what you did and then i get that dead fish i face like i just asked them to kill my grandma i'll event help them out a bit and give them file names and ask if they edited them and if i continue to get a space cadet i'll just revert to generic questions to pad out the rest of the interview and hit the 30 minute mark sometimes recruiters will change the resumes to fit the job better without telling the applicant i have had this happen a few times one being they left out my education and experience and lied to me about the role i would be interviewing for sometimes the recruiters change it most of the people in my industry work for one or two big players based on their geography at some point in their career i get people that claim to work for x company all the time especially in the early 2000s issue for them is was a project manager for a decade and did most of the hiring i love to ask them their experiences working there throwing out names or projects and seeing how they respond the commitment to the charade is amazing sketchy job history or several jobs in a short time span i had a woman once that had around 10 jobs over the last 2.5 years she claimed to have a wealth of knowledge from all of these different opportunities to learn she talked around most questions and long story short i found out that she and a friend would apply accompanies as minorities and then quit and sue for discrimination she had suede of the 10 bullet dodged over the past five years i've held i think four jobs but i was a student and everyone knew and accepted that i was doing it for a little money and a learning experience unfortunately now i'm a full-blown adult and have to stick around for at least two years to make my job history look good i once interview someone who said they spoke english when it was time for the interview she only spoke russian i happened to have someone who spoke russian and english so they translated the entire interview i have some solid answered so i hired her anyway she worked for us for four years and by the time she left she knew english that's actually a pretty cool story telltale signs that the candidate is making stuff up makes for great stories but it isn't what bothers me what bothers me is that i am convinced that there are people that are great interviewers and poor interviewers my boss hired a great interviewer months later we escorted him out of the building because he was beyond worthless i wish i knew how many rock stars i we passed on because they sucked at interviewing so i was sitting next to my boyfriend while he was giving a phone interview and the guy was clearly googling answers he would ask him to repeat almost every question then paused before a textbook answer and at one point he asked him to spell the word but after knowing the spelling knew the exact definition lol i once asked to a supposedly experienced front-end developer can you code valid html her reply was more than enough yes all my software is legal star questions situation task action result are designed to root out people that don't have real experience or if they do have experience the questions will expose their level of skill and work personality if i ask can you handle underperforming reps you can build a vague answer easily but if i say tell me about a time when you had to coach an underperforming rep what was the scenario what actions did you take and what was the result that's much harder to bulls your way through if you are making things up the only way to get through those questions is to be vague which is why you will see vagueness as a big tell in most of these comments when they get to round two and i test them on the things they made up i have felt bad for some of them last bad one was an excel expert who couldn't do basic tasks with a pivot table i think the worst was a candidate that could not multiple or divide by 10. to be fair i was never any good with pivot tables but i could write formulas that would probably impress the heck out of you back in the day i impressed the lotus help desk guys so much they had a couple of managers on the line to hear what i was doing but it depends on what your needs are i never had any use for a pivot table so i never learned i used to do phone interviews to screen candidates or higher up recruiters the jobs i screened for required proficiency in english and for one of the jobs this was really important because it could be potentially dangerous and most of the people in the country were native english speakers the proficiency was met if the interviewer could understand the questions and adequately respond but for one particular candidate i had gotten through the basic questions that really only needed a yes or no including a question about understanding the necessity of understanding english for the position but as soon as i started asking more in-depth questions he would give me very short grammatically poor sentences that didn't elaborate in the way i had asked i also started hearing a lot of background noise and soon heard people whispering responses to him based on the job history and past residences i figured he didn't actually know english and that his family was frantically trying to google what i asked and was trying to help him respond i feel bad that he was likely an immigrant just doing his best to get any sort of entry-level position but safety is safety and if you can't understand warnings and emergency announcements in the predominant language of your workplace you're more liable to get hurt agree with many of the comments here my own view one no examples just vague conversation or talking points to avoid or can't answer follow-up questions three multiple interviewers hear a different story and take away i had one person tell me they lived and breathed operations and another interviewer they never worked in operations before do you think we don't talk before making a decision i've been running kitchens for a long time and anytime i get an interview who's talking like gordon ramsay or postulating about how good they are and how inspired by michelin starred chefs they are it's a massive red flag that this idiot's cooking experience has been 90 youtube videos eight percent home cooking and two percent standing around looking at his phone on the line raging passion for the food industry is carved into you and it shows in your people skills cooking skills and work ethic it doesn't come from calling your co-workers idiots and pretending you know better than your head chef the one that really stands out for me was a candidate that was reapplying for his old job and claimed on his resume that he had done my job at our software company we first screen potential candidates through a phone call with technical recruiters one applicant did exceptionally well on the phone interview answering all questions with apparently so we decided to interview in person the in-person interview went shockingly horrible the candidate was unable to answer even the most basic questions after a few attempts to simplify questions i finally decided to ask him what was going on turns out we had interviewed his computer scientist son on the phone and he was simply hoping to skirt by the in-person interview with 20 years of experience in construction lost his job i tried to hire his son but he wasn't entrusted this kind of makes me sad whenever i interview people i always ask offhand questions with warning right before i ask that is i want to pick your ability to think here it's okay if you don't know the point is to see if there's any thought process in the event of equipment failure i work in biotech some will admit lack of knowledge and that's perfectly okay and expected some others who really don't know will still try to fluff so i start to get more technical if they continue they're out i have found that if i give people enough rope they will either hang themselves or tie a beautiful knot i leave a lot of negative space in the conversation and people tend to fill it because they want the interview to go smoothly it's what they fill it with that lets you know about them if i am not an expert in this specific job i try to have someone sit and that is i have had interviews where i had an sme sit in and when the interview was over i thought the candidate was good and the sme tells me that they are completely full of crap some people are pleasant people they just don't have the technical knowledge so it's good to have someone smarter than them in the room if they try to downplay a task that you know is actually difficult for example i worked at a hotel and whenever we had people apply to be housekeepers and claim to have experience but when you tell them how many rooms they would have to clean a day they would go 17 i could do 2025 easy but never ask how big the rooms were just basic stuff where they talk a big game and overplay their hand oh good if you can do 25 easy then 50 shouldn't be a problem i always just assume resumes are a fluffed up bowl of half truths that they make themselves appear better and more competent useful on i usually like to see how long someone worked somewhere for if they're rocking six jobs in a year that's a sign this person might be off but if they have longevity at wherever they work that holds some weight i would say as for talking to them it's just a matter of getting a read on them life isn't like a movie where everything you say or ask will prompt a witty response or a great five minute story life is filled with awkward pauses and um if they do have the gift of gab that's great but also means they can fudge things much easier cause they know how to work people verbally so keep your guard up i genuinely dislike needing to submit a fluffed up bull of half-truths at least as much as i am sure people who have to re-read the same buzzwords and meaningless titles repeatedly probably do i've done some hiring and i like to ask is there anything in the job description that you have doubts about being able to perform the person i picked had some questions about quickbooks honest answer and it was a very minimal part of the job so i moved on one guy answered by telling me he had no doubts or questions at all about any aspect of the job unlikely but possible scenario he's being honest in his over-qualified moderately likely scenario he didn't read the job description entirely and didn't know what to ask most likely scenario he's full of crap and is just feeding me what i want to hear anyone who works in a tech role seriously our recruiters will bring in anyone who checks off enough boxes under our required skills they are easily fooled trying to fool the person who works with these systems on a daily basis ain't gonna happen though it's easy to tell who's been there before it's even easier to spot someone who is confused by completing a basic task also important for the college kids when companies hire for a junior entry-level roles they fully expect most of the applicants to have slim to no experience i personally look for kids who are motivated and have the problem-solving mindset there are intangible things that will tell me if you'll be good at learning the job or not so don't panic if you don't click most of the boxes on the application for phone or skype interview if they come back to a technical question they bombed earlier and answer it with a textbook sometimes literally response they've had time to look up the answer while the interview continued a lot of industries has some easy softball questions that nobody with real experience should struggle with even under stress how many clustered indexes can you have on a table miss that one but rattle off a perfect description of every known isolation level without drawing a breath that's reading it out of a book not experience at my company they were doing an online interview to someone in india when they started making him technical questions they noticed the audio went out of sync they played closer attention and realized that in fact he was not talking he was trying to lip sync someone else who was in the room with him answering the questions they stopped the interview instantly he wasn't hired and neither was his more knowledgeable friend when you ask them about something on their resume and they use the term we in their answer without ever saying what he she actually did it says here that you increase market share by 15 on your last product what did you do to contribute you that market share well we increased training and did this and that and the other thing my question was what you as an individual contributor did to increase your market share well we worked as a team but what did you do good interview answers discuss what the team did and what the individual contributed if the individual can't articulate what they contributed they likely contributed little to nothing likewise if they take all the credit then they are also likely full of crap yeah i got stung by this i'm super modest and don't like to talk myself up so i always used wii or the tmail until one interviewer mentioned your point to me mid interview and it blew my mind now i focus on my achievements and then how they help my team rather than lumping everything in as a team effort i interviewed one person recently that has had seven different contracts in the past four years with seven different employers she told us flat out that everyone that she works for offers her permanent work she has been looking for permanent work but yet she is so liked by these places and never gets it i know they all have hired permanent people since and even have positions open but the big sign is that she did not list any of them as a reference if they loved her and could not find her work they would be surely happy to find her work elsewhere manager do you speak french guy or girl yeah manager say quarters dispen abilities paula to maine guy or girl sorry may swee manchak's jesus sunchatress formidable jay habitan alemandovecon ordinature illustrate uncaspides japan's jason gans i think that should answer your question praise interviewer doesn't actually speak french i was a co-manager and i organized the interviews while the other co-manager gave the interviews i brought a candidate to the office and left him with the co-manager for the interview five minutes later i see the candidate walk out the door i think to myself geez what the heck happened the co-manager comes up to me and he says that was one for the books i asked him what responsibilities he had at the most recent employer he had listed on his resume ups he said i don't work at ups then i asked him about a position he had a couple of years ago and he said he never heard of the company that was listed on his resume finally i just asked him if he made all of this up he apologized said yes and got up and left man i remember for a wintry technician job they made do all these ike tests and then ask me how to rewire a freaking big calibration machine or scales or whatever it was i forgot bro i couldn't do it like that's literally the job i needed that job so i could learn it was a freaking nightmare and was embarrassing i was so unprepared and didn't realize job interviews were that serious what gradual knows how to actually do the job out of college man in college we literally learn how to learn and then these hr people come up with freaking impossible standards to live up to have three years experience postgraduate as an entry-level job then they turn around and say it's okay to apply for jobs even if you have no years experience then they wonder why people lie or highly inflate their abilities on their resume because people are getting desperate after searching for jobs for months to years to not even hear call backs everyone wants experience but no one is willing to give it i hire people for a fast food job all the time so it really doesn't have many requirements it's quite interesting when at the interview some people will add all these other places they have worked of course they don't have contact numbers on any of them especially when you ask a customer service related question something along the lines of a customer received the wrong pizza and is calling us unhappy about it how do you handle the situation when they've worked half a dozen fast food jobs but stumble over it super hard it's suspicious i don't even care if they don't know or if they have work experience but if they seem disorganized or appear to be straight up lying i won't hire them jairo's offered it what did the candidate wear to an interview that cost them the job his beat headphones over his neck i don't know if it counts though because there were many other reasons also including three f-bombs to start the interview i once went to an interview in which my skirt split up the back as my interviewer followed me up the stairs i was told i was too confident for the job unusual one emo my wife interviews a lot of people for therapy roles of varying types there's usually a group interview after the initial ones and all the co-workers said they wouldn't hire a woman because of her shoes the candidate had louis vuitton shoes on the reasons they gave were she probably wants too much money not she like even needs the job and perceived her as a person they wouldn't get along with she ultimately didn't get past the first interview i asked my wife about it and she said she didn't even notice what she had on her feet she didn't hire her because her experience was with adults and not children once had a guy come to interview at the software company i worked at wearing a female body inspector shirt that ended quickly i was working for a concessionaire for a mlb team where we do a mass hiring event before the season starts this man came into the waiting room in street clothes asked to go to the restroom and changed into a halloween style pimp suit this included a hat and a cane a t-shirt of mickey mounting mini from behind it was disturbing on so many levels not the least of which was how well done it was this was for a minimum wage position but still i used to be the physician led for my group's np program as such i was involved with the interviews hirings our business manager refused to consider a qualified candidate because she wore baby doll socks with her outfit i never understood that one i sometimes do campus recruiting and interviews but don't make final hiring decisions with that said at a campus event my partner and i were going through a line of over 300 people we scan their resume ask a bunch of questions to get them in our system and add some quick comment suggestions had a person wait in line for several hours when she got to me she had no resume and still had on pajamas now i never try to judge a book by its cover but i have to get through a person in under four minutes on average and have about 20 questions to ask to put info for hr into our system i was ready to power through this as fast as possible to get to a candidate that was an actual potential hire however this girl was graduating with a 4.0 bs computer science at the age of 17 she spoke seven languages fluently i could not verify this she said she had started working on phd research when she was 14 but didn't want to continue with school i had to convince her to go make a resume as i could not complete her in our system without it and wanted to make sure she was visible to the right people honestly i was surprised she even wanted to work at our fortune 500 company it's a great start for most people but i would think prodigies would have other options than a 70k salary in texas she did go make a resume and waited in line again i made sure hr found her profile but i have no idea if she signed on with us i'm surprised a prodigy finishing cs at 17 and already working a phd thesis wasn't interested in going to academia not an interview but i worked for a video webcast company and we hired freelancers to operate our cameras sometimes when we were short staffed the rule is that you wear all black so you blend into the background freelancer showed up in a tie-dye sweatshirt and cargo shorts he ended up operating a camera right next to the head of the bioethics committee that reports directly to the president not only did we not ever hire him again the client asked us to never bring him back interviewing for our food service department within a well-known hospital in saint louis young girl lower 20s comes in wearing bright yellow uggs and a davy crockett hat as if that wasn't enough she also had one of those tails not a butt plug type just attached to her pants full club attire clothes and makeup i work in an office building for a health care company chick had a super short sparkly silver dress and six inch heels i don't know how she sat down without the dress ripping maybe she was a stripper who just finished her college degree and couldn't quit her old job until she got a new one and you scheduled you interview at such a time as she did not have time to change out of her work attire obligatory not a hirer but an interviewee i went for an interview at an insurance firm when i was 19. i was wearing office wear so smart casual but when i left my house i realized it was tipping it down so went back inside to grab my jacket which was an adidas striped hoodie type jacket i literally didn't think anything of it i got to my interview took the jacket off as soon as i entered the building and hung it up on the hook because it was soaking wet had my interview thought it went well and just as i was grabbing my jacket off the hook my interviewer told me maybe for next time i went for an interview to leave the jacket at home as it looked unprofessional my time to shine i used to do hiring for a small company in lexington kentucky place wasn't super formal but i would make it a point to tell people that if they came in for the interview it should be treated as such we also had a lot of people coming from employment agencies anyways call this applicant for an interview which she gladly accepts so i give her a time date with what we need as a company resume list of references and last 28 years of addresses for abuse background check she shows up 15 minutes late in what can be considered theoretically to be a dress this thing was epic it was a see-through mesh dress with neon pink bra underwear and five-inch heels on top of that she had waist-length blonde braids being that there is a barely dressed woman waiting for me in the reception area i asked the owner of the company to sit in for interview didn't want anything to be misconstrued lady sits down and we do the interview i explained to her what we did as a company and our mission statement we provided services for individuals with idd after i explained this to her she gets this look on her face and said i am not working as an butt wiper for no retards at this point the interview is over and she is definitely not who we are going to hire after she left i moved the chair she sat onto an empty office across the hall i was doing the hiring for an entry-level retail job an interviewer called and said he was running late because his other job kept him late okay no problem really i get a call from the service desk that the guy showed but was running down to the restroom my co-worker and i went to the common area and waited about five minutes passed and we were just sitting there bullshitting for a few finally after literally 15 minutes i had my co-worker head down and see if maybe the guy was lost or didn't know where to go then my co-worker and this guy come walking to the interview table and apparently this guy decided to hurry up and shave first his face was bleeding from six seven spots and he had toilet paper on them we didn't end up hiring him but it was really because his interview was absolutely terrible i kind of felt bad for him because he obviously was really trying hard to make a good impression too much cologne perfume i have ended numerous interviews because of this i have had hiring managers end interviews early because they could not stand the stench one time the hiring manager had an asthma attack because of this guess what the candidate did not get the job pro tip cologne should be discovered not announced also if you wear cologne google for more tips the info is out there people use it 40 year old lady passed her interview but then showed up for her first day at the factory in a mini skirt with stilettos and a deep v-neck sheer tank she was asked to leave i wish my old job would have done that to people so many people came in dressed completely inappropriately for the job we were a shipping warehouse and a lot of people wore awful shoes at the very least you need sneakers with some grip but i was one of the only people wearing steel toad boots even after someone dropped a pallet and almost broke their foot they never said anything did the hiring for an ambulance company had someone call and ask for the dress code prior to their interview i always tell people to wear something they feel is comfortable but appropriate he showed up in a t-shirt with cannabis leaves on it i didn't finish the interview while i don't disagree with the legalization of it i feel it would be irresponsible for me to hire someone that promotes drug use mainly because paramedics handle narcotics in case anyone was wondering i would have done the same if it was an alcohol reference interviewee not a hirer for this but just out of college i could not get a job got to the point where i was applying everywhere showed up in my slacks shirt and tied to an interview at a gas station market i was told no guy that wears a tie to an interview is going to stay there long enough to be considered as higher able so basically i overdressed and my interview was just long enough to tell me that no way were they going to hire someone who wore a tie to the interview goodbye yeah it has to be practical too you don't wear a suit to a physical job a nice dress shirt and jeans should be fine okay for context our office was in midtown manhattan the subway station is literally inside our building where you don't need to go outside to get in dude lives in queens so he is obviously taking the subway in also as everyone knows in nyc at the first sign of a sprinkle ubiquitous three dollar umbrella stands open on every street corner and subway station he shows up dripping wet like not caught in a rain shower like fell in a pool and did a few laps wet now in what little defense i can offer this guy it was raining but like a light shower not a downpour or anything close to what it would have taken this guy to get as wet as he was i really can't overstate how soaked this dude was i could try and get as wet as him in the rain we were having and wouldn't come close so the receptionist calls me and is kind of giggling and is like hey uhhh line you have a john smith here for an interview i started him on the papers bit yeah just come down because normal process was she would give him some papers that would take like 10 minutes to fill out and then ring me when he was done so i go down there and well with dude uhhh okay he is otherwise appropriately dressed for office environment suit bag for his assumingly wet papers etc i tell him he can work on the papers afterwards and bring him into my office because i really don't want to wait to get to the bottom of this guy sits down with an audible squish which catches me off guard and i'm uhhh so raining out hot yeah seems like you got caught in it yeah like no umbrella no is it really raining that hard out there not really well you are making my chair soggy oh sorry should i stand what no so like did you take the train in yeah but then how did you get so wet well it's raining a bit outside it quickly devolved into a panel interview which was just trying to figure out how he got so wet we brought people in who wouldn't normally be involved in the process just to see the wet dude i think we might have asked a total of two questions about actual job qualifications and that was only as an afterthought to this day 10 years later i still lay away at night wondering what the heck happened to that guy i tried to make the case to my boss to hire him just so we could maybe one day know you only want to hire him to find out how he got so wet and to see what other crap he does no our best guess is he michael scott into some fountain or something but again there wasn't one in our building and we couldn't figure out where he would have done it along his way hypothesis he spilled something on himself or leaned on something wet so it looked like he had an accident or something along those lines then he decided to hide it by just soaking himself from head to toe at the restroom sink i've had candidates bomb out of interviews for various reasons but only one that killed her candidacy by being poorly dressed the co-worker pete knows i'm hiring and tells me all about john i need to hire john john is the best jean cv puts her in the middle of the pack so we ask her to come and for an interview jhana is wearing a beach cover-up and a skirt over a swimsuit jean has finger combed her hair out at best she is wearing heels at the time our office only allowed jeans on fridays and required collared shirts on men every day apparently she felt that her friendship with pete gave her a leg up so she didn't bother she was not hired ro if a friend referred me i would be on my best behavior so as not to embarrass them incidentally this is also why i will almost never recommend anyone else unless i know that i know that i know they will not make me look bad i heard about this one after being hired i work at a large retail chain that's not walmart we used to have a coffee shop near our deli area but the contract expired with that company and corporate was looking for the next big thing all set up for an interview meeting with an up-and-coming coffee chain and in walks a man with dreads wearing a tank top shorts and flip-flops for the interview they didn't even continue the meeting just told him they were no longer interested based on his appearance that guy owned dutch brothers the most important person in a room full of suits is the one wearing t-shirts and jeans i was a candidate interviewing over my lunch hour since it was a 2-3 minute drive away from my existing position i am a software engineer this industry doesn't pay you to look pretty for the last 12 years i've held salaried positions where i wore jeans every day i have successfully interviewed an everyday clothes when i interviewed at google i was told explicitly not to dress up so to the interview to clarify not google i wore the jeans and sweater that i wore to work that day during the interview it was mentioned they were looking to hire 70 software engineers over the next year to spin up a big project when they called later they said i aced the technical part but was disqualified for my dress props for giving feedback good luck in your search for the 70 best dressed engineers amused not bitter i think i dodged a bullet edit clarification good software engineers are a privilege to hire disqualifying a validated good candidate because of dress demonstrates stupidity in the management won't be the last time they make a dumb decision i served on a committee to hire a new church secretary parish office manager the applicant arrived wearing a heavily sequined blouse bright pink mini skirt and matching bright pink high heels studded with rhinestones the pastor took one gander at her and made the sign of the cross sending a clear signal that she wouldn't make an appropriate choice for a church position you misread the signal he was saying jesus says this one a very experienced career sales guy applied for a full-time sales gig at our store he came in about a week before his formal interview just to say hi amd introduced himself to the manager he had arrived wearing a hawaiian shirt bought shorts and thongs flip-flops few filthy americans as he had come in and announced and it wasn't formal yet this was fine however the next week when he arrived for his formal interview he was dressed in the exact same outfit i just couldn't believe it we weren't sure if he was just that confident that he would be hired because of his experience or whether he legitimately didn't give a freak this guy's interview lasted all of about five minutes he did not get hired and instead we hired a 23 year old with zero sales experience who actually worked out great i'm british and i still did a double take i'm a manager for a fashion retailer with a big focus on games as a general rule what people wear to an interview will not cost them the job by itself but it certainly sways opinion as to me it suggests they can't read the vibe of where they are applying i always recommend airing towards overdressed than under last week i had someone come to an interview in a grubby hoodie and work out leggings hair greasy looking no makeup etc she unprompted i don't comment on how people are dressed told me that she was told wearing jeans was a no no not a solid first impression then in scenario questions she was snippy and rude had a full-on karen moment and used the word douche so no she wasn't hired she was tanking the interview on purpose sounds like she either was told to report there by unemployment or possibly welfare or mum and dad made her go but she didn't want to work interviewing a candidate for a position in a bank she showed up wearing a belly shirt crop top she stood up at the end of the interview and bam her better button was right in front of my face what a horrific scene we were taking potential new hires for a tour of the office during an open evening lady set off the fire alarm with her bag accidentally stepped away absolutely not faced or embarrassed didn't apologize when i was running around trying to get it deactivated stable evening and helped herself to refreshments she didn't get the job early twenties male came in wearing a red t-shirt with a black silhouette of a pole dancer on the back in big white letters it said helping single mothers one dollar at a time a tongue ring the guy was interviewing for a job as an english as a second language teacher he sounded like he had a mouth full of marbles quick interview pink cow print furry vest jeans pink cow print cowboy hat the panel was myself and my director after that interview we worked out a secret code to cut the interview short whenever someone was clearly too crazy for the job i don't know this individual sounds like they might liven the place up not be useful probably bit entertaining surely story 2 entry level help desk roll guy comes in wearing attacks clearly he didn't have a suit and rented it i mean i get it there are people who don't need a suit and don't have a few hundred to drop on one when starting out but come on plus it was before five i used to hire for a retailer that had been sued for a lack of diversity as a result the interview included the series of questions what is diversity and inclusion is this important in the workplace why or why not i had someone basically to find segregation then tell me that it was important because not everyone gets along the best part was that this was a group interview with young adults the sheer horror on one of the guy's faces i will never forget he had the look on his face that i was feeling when i asked him his response he emphatically said the exact opposite of what she said underrated comment not the hiring manager but part of the group giving input on potential new hires i worked for a large oil field services company it was field work and we were hiring entry-level field hands expected interview clothing for this job was nice jeans and a casual button-down shirt if you felt fancy t-shirts and hoodies were also acceptable as long as you weren't wearing something completely juvenile anyway fresh out of college kid with an unrelated degree shows up to interview for a grunt work job in a three-piece suit his interview wasn't anything special the usual bit of knowing absolutely nothing about the type of work but wanting to get a foot into the door between his lack of even a basic online search of what the position entailed and his three-piece suit we ultimately moved his resume to the no pile my boss's reasoning was that if someone showed up to our office dressed like that without a single clue of what the work was like they would quit in a week anyway which was typical for people who didn't realize just how physically demanding the job was if he had shown up dressed a little less fancy he may have gotten a shot since this was a zero experience needed position i would be surprised if he lasted a week i know people working positions like that or doing brutal factory work and they have had new hires come and work four hours and leave for a lunch break never coming back after that the record where my stepdad worked was a bit under two hours before walking off the jobsite interviewee here i once went on an interview back when i had what was called a marilyn bridge this is a tooth thing i am missing both of my bicuspids due to genetics the problem is that this type of bridge is not very strong and i was constantly knocking the fake teeth loose by just existing i'm sure you can see where this is going faux tooth fell out just before interview tried to just hold it in there but interviews are a lot of talking and it was definitely noticed needless to say did not get the position i have since had full bridges put in so now all six of my top front teeth are fake it definitely worries me about the future as it is like 10k to replace something like that is considered cosmetic and is not even remotely covered and without my top six front teeth i'm guessing i will never be hired for anything again thanks genetics a very formal the badly fitting three-piece suit i was a manager at a retail company that has a reputation for being very casual urban in appearance we had no uniforms or dress code at all beyond common sense the only thing that identified a person as a staff member was a company lanyard wearing business casual would have seemed out of place let alone going full black tie to be completely fair it didn't cost him the job 100 by itself but it was the first big sign that he could not read the room badly fitting a sounds like dude went to a thrift shop and got whatever was the least horrible out of the available interviewer clothes this is a little different but funny in middle school i wrote a screenplay and turned it into a movie my father is a cinematographer he turned it into a movie i went along for the ride one of the characters was supposed to be preppy and popular and the girl auditioning for the role sent in a photo of herself in full goth attire as her headshot she was a friend though so she got the part your dad sounds awesome white tank top and denim games after they left the interview an associate pulled the guy aside and told him to not bother going to any more interviews anywhere unless he got a new outfit that's nice on the part of the associate what are subtle green flags at a job interview that say working here would rock when you come into the office and see people casually talking and laughing about something work related bonus points if one of them is the interviewer it's pretty cool when you see an office where people genuinely like each other i'm in the software industry and a lot of companies are kind of sweatshops i like to schedule people to interview in the afternoon so when their interview ends at five o'clock they can see people packing up and going home at the end of their day during the interview for my current job i saw people packing up and leaving around 3 34 i immediately thought oh now i really want this job when the interviewer is genuinely excited about what the company does i walked into the interview for my current job expecting it to use it as practice for my next interview i met the ceo at a coffee shop and he was so passionate about the company he got me hooked i've been doing this almost three years now and i've never enjoyed a job more although that could be a sign of an mlm a great question to ask in interviews is what do you like about working here it frequently catches the interviewer off guard and you can learn a ton from their reaction it's usually pretty easy to tell whether they are being sincere and there's things they enjoy or if the workplace actually sucks restaurant worker here the first green flag is when i have confirmed that i will get the hours i need to survive and the boss immediately respects my our restrictions if they go i will see that just means you might get 20 hours a week or we'll make you work like a dog until you burn out for my job interview at a restaurant on the way and a guy was sweeping the front walk we gave each other a big smile that was the manager just kinda helping the place look a bit better while he was waiting for me it was a good job i've had two interviews this week not one asked me the stereotypical questions more so my qualifications how to handle certain situations the interviewers today and i went on a side track talking about early 2000s pop punk dog training and cooking the main interview he joked she'd take me in right now it was a fun interview all smiles laid back but still professional my first interview wasn't as fun but relaxed and good communication he also let me know after questions things like that's exactly it oh i like that that's the answer i give i landed the first one i feel great about today's point is i didn't feel pressured or like i was actually being judged smiles and laughs in an interview are the largest green flag you can imagine at least one of the people interviewing you will be your direct manager and they seem cool also they've been there for years people overlook this a lot i think big companies usually have a separate recruiting department than where you will actually be working so your manager never interviews you i don't actually have the job yet but i'm fixing to start work as an outbound salesman at a staffing agency because i'm low on cash i asked to be staffed as a temp with one of the factories we contract with in the meantime can't start for a couple months because of internal politics started off great but lo and behold working in a factory didn't mesh well with my chronic back pain i made it a week because i was afraid quitting the factory would jeopardize my job offer from the agency but it really was getting unbearable it eventually got too painful and knowing that quitting on short notice would leave them in a really bad position they would have needed to find a new employee to work at the factory before the end of the day one hour later and ask that they work on finding a replacement for me but insisted that i stay until they find someone else so as to not cause any problems rather than taking me up on my offer the head of the agency and my future boss insisted that i stopped working there immediately expressed guilt that i had been afraid to call sooner and stayed an hour late to find me a reassignment and place a new temp at the factory needless to say that really bolstered my faith in the company and i'm really excited to start working for them he could have been concerned about having to pay workers comp since you might have hurt yourself worse while working for them i walked in and while shopping the owner seemed impressed by my knowledge on the subject when i identified an old surplus rifle he didn't recognize and we ended up beasing for a few hours my next visit i was offered a job best job i have had in my life kinda how i got my current job be said with the the store director for a bit then asked if he was hiring my future boss correctly pronounced my name when picking me up in the lobby her support mentorship and care for growth and happiness still our main the reason i'm with the company seven years later rat isn't that hard to pronounce when i interviewed after i got laid off i asked how they handled the pandemic it shows a lot about the type of company there and how they view their employees it says so much my old boss did some really crappy things to employees during the beginning of the pandemic probably still is i don't know and i told myself i'm going to remember this and use it as motivation to finally leave the job when the pandemic is over turns out i got a new job anyway but i would never have been able to forget that and keep working there in the last interview of my current job they were all joking and having a great time with me as well as one another i could tell they were more interested in how i would fit in with the culture after they figured out i was qualified they were very candid about the technical struggles of the company itself but all of them had beaming looks in their eyes when they discussed benefits and other employee interactions not going to lie they didn't lie at all about the systems being trash but the culture and openness is what is keeping me there they also pay pretty freaking fat compared to the other companies around me we all try our best with what we have and that's what keeps us all going since starting only one person in my immediate office area has left for another company and there have been many new job additions the application process is pretty normal and respectful of your time i send your resume and brief cover letter and references as opposed to those seven hour personality quizzes they don't seem too quick to want to hire you on the spot there's no major demographic difference between non-customer facing and customer facing positions but like if you go in and everyone you see in the public sales areas is white and everyone in production is hispanic that's a little iffy look at people's faces people can bulls you all day long but there are often easy to read facial expressions that tell the real story for a second i read that as look at people's faces coming from a child care perspective how much art is on the walls if there's a lot of art and with plenty of style variation it shows me the kids are engaging well with the adults and the staff is creating a good environment for them to explore same thing with how many books are on the shelves this is a good measure of any place high payments without the workers looking like overused rags people look happy always check the area where you plan to work it's easy to spot the red flags with some attention literally had an interviewing manager tell me i don't care if you show up in a bathrobe with a toothbrush hanging out of your mouth if you can get the job done and your skills are what you say then we're all good also notice someone with a glass of wine on their desk on my way out it was friday afternoon and this was considered perfectly fine one of the best jobs i've had this is great because i just had an interview a couple days ago that went really well i showed up a few minutes early before the boss unlocked the doors and some guy clearly on crack came along and banged on the door turned around to look at me and said he's not a nice guy and then stalked off i thought it was kind of weird so i mentioned it to the boss he said it was most likely the same guy he had chased off with the hammer the previous night he explained that the guy came in clearly tweaking and was being creepy threatening to the staff obviously the creepy guy isn't the green flag but the fact that the owner is willing to protect the staff instead of just placating problem customers was a huge plus in my book anyway i start in february i like that you want your boss to chase off drug addicts with hammers i have a few thoughts on this break policy are breaks based on the needs of the company or the needs of the employee salary transparency are you going to make as much as someone in the same position who was recently hired does the company hide who much people make employee retention a few posts have mentioned you want a company with a balanced turnover rate but i feel there is a lot to be said if a majority of employees have been with the company for 20 years or so for example interviewing folks for a position next week saw that someone emailed me a question i'll respond at 8 30 on monday so they see that we don't respond to emails on our phone over the weekend that's your time not company time for me it was when my manager just chatted with me instead of interviewing i mean he did interview but it wasn't formal it was nice and relaxed and he wanted to get a sense of who i was in the moment rather than rigid standard questions i got asked once if i was a serious person and laughed and he told me that was the first time well no crap you've been asking me interview questions for 30 minutes my favorite company i worked for the president of the co was my last interview and all we talked about was the pixies concert the week before after getting the job i asked him later why he didn't really interview me and he said everyone before me interviewed me he just wanted to see if i was the type of person he could go to lunch with spent 13 years with them prompt communication during the scheduling and interview process they get back to you quickly after each response and seem genuinely interested in talking to you nothing worse than someone who takes days to respond or even just ghosts you halfway through when i was walking through the office to the hr office i could see many bottles of fireball on people's desks to be fair i wasn't sure if that was a green light or a red light until someone who worked there told me that they were left over from the company's weekly happy hour so depending on the company that could definitely be a red flag and as someone who doesn't drink i would be right back out the door haha their demeanor will say a lot last place i interviewed my boss kept telling jokes and overall had a lovely attitude for how maniacal our workspace can get usually is i tend to be very nervous and intimidated by interviewers but my boss had such a good attitude it was hard to feel uncomfortable i went into the interview a total stiff thinking in the back of my mind how serious i had to be taken to meet expectations etc but my boss broke me out of my shell and we were hitting it off as friends whilst still maintaining that she's a boss i'm the employee demeanor she was gauging my drive more than my abilities which i thought was awesome she seemed to really enjoy her role and working for her the last four years i can definitely see that she loves it and can say that i love my role as well this one wasn't a traditional interview but when i went to interview with parents about a nannying gig the mom was so stoked that it made me nervous i did however have a long conversation with the kids about what it would be like to turn into a frog it turns out she let the youngest decide who she wanted to spend her days with and didn't want to influence her decision a few days later the three-year-old called to say i was hired almost seven years later and it's the best job i've ever had the girl who hired me is one of my favorite people in the world and their family has become my own i know i freak around and comment sometimes who doesn't like to troll a [ __ ] sometimes but this is so freaking cute coming from a social work perspective meeting genuine human beings i got my current job a couple years ago now i was on my third interview with one agency who has an insanely long in-depth hiring process i don't think i breathed during a single one of those interviews i sat there in pant suits talking across desks to other people in pant suits they went through formal questions and scenarios everything there was very business why and at the time so was i and then i went to interview with the company i'm now at the director was wearing a cute dress curled up in the chair next to me grabbed a blanket cause she was chilly chatted doodled on my resume as we talked and was totally at ease and suddenly i was two she asked about my passions my goals my ideal job position she told me about how she had spent a therapy session that day laying outside with a kid looking at clouds she made me feel comfortable and showed me that she really cared about what she does and that she does it for the right reasons the three interview job did offer me a position paid mileage my own work phone educational benefits to get my master's degree and a nice salary i turned it down and i'm grateful that i did because i've grown so much as a clinician and a person i feel like i'm able to be authentic and have a really good rapport with my clients no suits no pressure just real humans empathizing and connecting with other real humans and honestly i have yet to see another agency in the area that does what we do as well as we do it they say family is more important than work they say work life balance is a high priority they recognize people for accomplishments i personally find those phrases meaningless they are things interviewers might say regardless of their actual culture see also we work hard and play hard i love this question review to see if they are a b corporation ask the interviewer about their own path and longevity with the company take a look at the company's growth over time and yes life work balance and low turnover software developer here had an interview where i was asked to write a spring boot system to solve a super simple problem interviewer then asked me questions about my approach and collaborated with me by giving suggestions basically told me i would learn a lot from the job and that they cared more about how i thought then what i knew i got the job and certainly have learned a lot i'm an engineer so when i meet people at a prospective company that are clearly passionate about their tech and geek out over what they're doing that's the sort of enthusiasm i want to be surrounded by bonus points if they have nerdy collectibles or other indications that it's not all business i've worked at three companies in my line of work and for the last two interviews i asked the interviewer boss man not hr how many of the guys names he knew the last job the guy said most of them i had a crap time there and left in three months my current job the guy said he knew everyone i've been here eight months so far and it's the most laid back place really great environment and they care about the employees i had an interview at a massage place this week the assistant manager had blue hair i was no longer concerned about having tattoos and piercings or looking unprofessional i'd still keep it all covered if they ask though if they volunteer some downsides unprompted in an interview say you would ask what's the culture like and they give you two positives and one negative point that is but we are quite corporate in some regards and bureaucracy is a thing here it shows that they aren't open enough to acknowledge that not everything is perfect it never is and they value you enough to be honest with you so you can make an informed choice just like they are making as an employer about you it makes sense cause it's better that the candidate makes an informed decision and then stays with the company getting someone who'll soon be disappointed and leave is more work for the hiring team and an issue for client relationship from experience with bad workplaces and with my current workplace at our door if the staff have inside jokes it's probably a good sign i've worked at places where everyone has caught your but there's some underlying catterness that's hard to see until you're actually there for a while where i am at now we have inside jokes my co-worker that i couple with is a retired art teacher and a very sweet and gentle lady but i can also text my boss and say we need to post bail for co-worker she delivered that order to the police station like you asked did she also flip them off and cuss them out before pulling a u-turn a wheelie running into a fire hydrant and catching air off the subsequent explosion of water an actual text i sent him once he responded with a gif where the person was shocked or they tease me and joke about how everything is but to fly's fault i could have been sick that day but he'll hear it later when something went wrong how i was the one to blame we joke about bribing the boss with candy cause of his sweet tooth only rivaled by my own when i was interviewing for my current position i told my supervisor that my wife was about to have a baby so i will need to miss work occasionally for doctor's appointments and obviously the birth his response was family is always first the job will always be here when i get back the next day they told me what they did when the pandemic first hit people who were out of training were given pto until they got everyone situated to work from home there were people in training who they couldn't keep in the office to keep training because of state laws but they didn't know how to do the job so they couldn't send them home either they fired them so they would qualify for unemployment and told them they would re-hire them as soon as they could start training in office again many decided not to come back because they were making more of unemployment there was a department of like three people whose jobs were basically completely useless because we weren't working in the office anymore so they gave them jobs that usually paid three dollars an hour less than what they were making and let them keep their pay until they could be placed back in their original positions while you're waiting in reception for your interviewer to come get you just looking at the body language and demeanor other people walking through can tell you a lot i want to go the opposite my company is ridiculous about hiring people they are super critical and the onboarding process is long so we are hiring temps now faster to hire it's a warehouse job pay is decent not great but a question my boss will ask is what is your dream job some of these guys can't even answer one dude legit said i just want to win the lottery today a very young kid came in today well-dressed very nice my boss asked him he said i want to be a marriage counselor it's my passion boss said that may have been his favorite interview ever hope we hire this kid and can get him some money to pursue his passion the coffee machine or lack of it i don't even drink coffee but a fancy machine out in the open in a clear welcoming area suggests the company wants the employees to feel good while working a dark kitchenette in the middle of nowhere with canned instant shows just how much they're willing to invest in your well-being a vending machine means they won't even spring for the kettle sink and canned stuff comma coming from a child care perspective how much art is on the walls if there's a lot of art and with plenty of style variation it shows me the kids are engaging well with the adults and the staff is creating a good environment for them to explore same thing with how many books are on the shelves but too much free food means they want you to stay late and never leave my boss at my current job had a one-on-one phone interview with me before bringing me into the office over the phone he asked me about my desired salary and i gave him a number at the technical interview things were going well and he pulled me aside before we wrapped up he told me that the salary number that i had asked for was too low for the amount of experience that i had and that he needed his team to be more worried about their work than they were about their finances that night i got the offer in my inbox and it was more than 20 over what i had requested i love my job but i'm loyal to my boss working for people that genuinely give a crap about you is the greenest flag i can imagine a few green flags i had gone in as a customer a few times before ever seeing the job posting and always had a good experience for my interview i met the hr manager at a starbucks and she insisted i get to fancy drink if that's what i wanted it made me feel like this wasn't a cheap company and they even wanted their interviewees to feel good we ended up chatting about chrissy tygan and i'm still here five years later the other great thing is that they are a local company with five locations but each location is managed by someone from the original team at the first location every time the owners chose to expand they essentially gave a store to one of their top employees nice to see that loyalty is rewarded and experience is valued i hated working at places where the managers were outside hires who had never done the job a solid mix of experience within the company the opposite version red flag would be the employee mixes all either ancient with 20 years experience or early 20s with one or two years of experience just had a job interview today chief was showing me around small clinic and everybody greeted me very warm saying welcome here with a big smile seemed like a huge green flag smiles are a green flag i once interviewed for a job and someone far away shook their head with wide eyes red flag in food service a very subtle green flag i like to see is employees dancing or singing along to the music being played in the bar tap room restaurant when the vacancy is created by someone getting an internal promotion that's a great sign that the company fosters talent and development also having a modest amount of sound walking through the floor and or open array of workspaces might mean that teamwork is a huge focus if you are new to the channel you can subscribe i publish new videos every day until then check another video [Music] bye for now

Channel: UE Stories

Views: 94,222

Keywords: job interview red flags, reddit job interview red flags, job interview, job interview funny, #updootst, updoot, reddit, r/askreddit, askreddit, ask reddit, r/, r\, best of reddit, reddit stories, reddit story, top posts, funniest posts, funny, funny posts, funny reddit stories, funny askreddit, reddit funny, askreddit funny, askreddit stories, reddit stories 2021, people of reddit, sub, reddit cringe, memes, toadfilms, updoot everything, updoot reddit, story, stories, rslash, comedy, fresh

Id: _SfF2gNWkgw

Length: 143min 19sec (8599 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 03 2021