Interviews can be intimidating, to say the least. But usually, the interviewer takes this into account. What they don’t consider is the possibility of ridiculous answers and disgusting moments. What really makes or breaks a candidate’s potential? Content edited for clarity.
Confession
“It was an unforgettable experience for me as an interviewer. This interview was for the recruitment of a Content Writer at one of the universities I was associated with.
The setting was perfect for an interview. The moderate temperature in the conference room, a revolving chair (for me, of course), and a good chair for the candidate.
The candidate was a smart girl who impressed everyone with her writing skills. Now, the face-to-face round was approaching and I was entrusted with conducting the routine meeting.
She entered the room (after seeking permission). A tall girl, with sharp features, smartly wrapped in perfect formals, carrying a classy leather folder. She impressed me upon first look.
The interview started with the cliche question- yes, you guessed it right- a personal introduction. I shot my next question i.e. what elements of a good writer do you have? She answered smartly with all the fundamentals of being a good writer.
The next question was about her education, which was not suitable for a writer’s job. She explained that she had a flair for writing since her adolescent stage and showed her blog. It was well-filled with lovely pieces of content.
The questions and answers continued in a smarter way and she started feeling very comfortable.
Now here comes the ruining and sickening factor.
She suddenly burped badly and puked on the table. I could sense a few drops on my shirt. Yuck.
Still, I showed no sign of any heinous or disgusted feelings. I asked if she needed water and showed her the way to the washroom. She came back crying and made a confession.
She was very nervous about the interview and one of her friends suggested she take two vodka shots right before.
It was unethical for an interview but she had the caliber and potential to become a writer. I never wanted to lose a candidate like her. I said, ‘For the rest of your life in this office if this remains between both of us, then I can give you chance.’
She nodded her head with signs of agreement. I asked the cleaning staff to clean the space and conveyed her feedback to HR Deptt. as a candidate selected. In the department, everybody knows one thing about that incident- she had food poisoning.
So that was an experience I can never forget. I always wondered how she didn’t smell like vodka when she came in. Her secret was never revealed.”
That One Guy No One Likes
“I tend to ask a couple of classics before throwing curve balls. One of my favorites is, ‘What weaknesses are you working on right now?’ It’s an old one that people tend to scoff at these days but I ask it for a variety of reasons.
A good answer will show that they’ve given this matter some thought and can display some level of self-awareness and areas for improvement. Depending on the answer, it gives me insight into whether they focus on internal or external issues or pressures. Someone who identifies a weakness with handling certain software versus a deeper level of insight around self-identified but genuine behavioral traits.
If they actually do answer ‘time management’ – it’s a good indicator that they lack depth and business sophistication. However, if they have a solid answer prepared, it shows that they’re committed and interested enough to invest time in working on interview answers. If they can give me the list of weaknesses and then roll straight into the steps they take to recognize and mitigate the negative patterns or behaviors, they’ll have my attention.
It’s a reasonable gauge of someone’s honesty. If they can speak openly and critically about their own performances and previous failures, it’s a positive signal for future employers.
I was interviewing one candidate for a mid-level position whose training and education were excellent as well as having some interesting yet short tenures at several high-profile businesses. So I asked the question: ‘What weaknesses are you working on right now?’
He responded with ‘nothing.’
I thought well that’s an unexpected yet brave response but I let it stand and rephrased the question tense:
‘Ok – What weaknesses have you worked on in the past?’
‘Nothing. I don’t have weaknesses. I’ve never had weaknesses.’
Alarm bells were going off and claxons started wailing in my head.
I actually thought he was being satirical to start with but no, he was serious. As far as he was concerned, he had no weaknesses, past or present. Three minutes later I wrapped up the interview.
Everyone has weaknesses. If you can’t even be honest enough with yourself to admit reality, it’s probably not going to go well.
Interestingly enough, one of my staff met the guy sometime later. He took time out to tell my currently employed rep that he was a fool for taking the job. The rejected candidate also claimed to my rep that he’d been offered the job first but had declined it due to insufficient salary for someone of his years and background. For ford’s sake, the guy hadn’t even made it to the second interview!”
Full Circle
“It only ever happened once. Well, let’s say once and a half.
We were interviewing for a senior trader on our desk. It was a small desk, only three people. We needed the fourth.
In came this guy, very experienced, with a good cv. Everything about him looked good. We were very excited.
At the time, I had three standard interview questions. All three were simple, but each of them had a catch. The idea was that you get to have a conversation with the interviewee about the catch, and through that, you find out what they know and what they don’t, how they solve problems, how they think – the whole lot.
But as simple as the questions were, nobody ever got all three right. I even once said that if anybody ever got all three without help, they could get whatever they wanted from me – job, money, my firstborn – anything. Most people never even got to hear all three questions – you can easily spend an hour on just one or two of them.
So I asked this guy my first question, and he saw right through it. He caught the catch and answered the question correctly. Wow. Good start. I never had that before.
I asked my second question. Same thing. He spotted it and got it right. Man. This guy was good. It had been less than two minutes, and he had dealt with two-thirds of the interview. I was starting to feel inadequate. Who was I to even be asking this guy questions?
So I asked the third question. It was a simple question about how to hedge some position. But the wording of the question makes it sound like he has to be on the receiving side of some swap, while in fact, he has to be on the paying side. That’s the catch.
And he immediately gets the right swap, but he wants to be on the wrong side. He wants to receive. Well, no big deal. Everybody wants to receive. Now we get to have a conversation.
I ask, ‘Are you sure you want to receive? Do you want to look a bit more closely at the cash flows?’
‘Yeah,’ he replied, ‘I’m absolutely sure. I don’t have to look at the cash flows.’
‘Ok, but it isn’t quite as simple as it looks. Have a look at the cash flows, see if they really match up,’ I wanted to give him plenty of room to get it right.
But he was firm and said, ‘No, I don’t need to look at the cash flows. I’m right.’
‘Well you are almost right, but not quite. You should really look at the cash flows,’ I said trying to be gentle about it.
‘No, I don’t need to look at the cash flows. I should receive. End of story,’ he said, finality in his tone.
So this went on for a while. I was practically begging him to look at the stupid cash flows, but he refused because he was sure he was right. I even told him he should really be on the opposite side of the swap, but he said he shouldn’t. And he didn’t need to look at the cash flows. And this kept going. And going.
I came to my last attempt.
‘Ok, so say you do it your way. You do the swap, you receive, you book it in your system, and the system shows that you are not hedged – in fact, you just doubled up. What do you do?’ I asked probatively.
‘The system must be wrong. Because I’m not,’ he said plainly.
Seriously.
So I ended the interview, and I gave my feedback to the others at the desk. The guy was really smart and really knew his stuff. But he was a walking time bomb. It was just a matter of time before he got something wrong. And as soon as he did, he would blow up the entire desk. Or worse. We didn’t make him an offer because of how he answered that one question. And he was a great candidate, head and shoulders above everybody else.
But the story doesn’t finish there.
A year or so later, there had been quite a few changes. Some things were reorganized, our desk was pretty much gone, and we all needed new jobs.
I was invited for an interview at a medium-sized bank. And who walked in to interview me? Why, none other than him – Mr. I-don’t-need-no-cash-flows!
He remembered me and my question. He admitted he thought about it, and he realized he got it wrong as soon as he walked out of our building. We laughed about it, we had a good interview.
But I wasn’t offered a job there. You could almost say, that one question eliminated two candidates, a year apart. And it was only asked once.”
No Filter
“We were interviewing this really smart and outgoing gentleman for an advising position. Aside from the one internal candidate that we had our eye on, this guy was pretty much our top pick. During the course of the interview, we asked him about some of his strengths, and he talked about being an educator at heart, and how he had a knack for being able to communicate anything as long as he understood it. He called it his ‘superpower.’
At the end of the interview, one of the guys on our hiring committee decided to ask him an off-topic question. He asked, ‘If you could have any superpower, what would it be?’
Keep in mind, we really liked this guy, so we were super eager to hear his answer.
He said, ‘If I could choose one superpower, I would want the ability to stop time so that I could walk into Walmart and load up my cart and leave.’
He suddenly realized what he had said and then awkwardly added, ‘Oh, but I wouldn’t do that, because stealing is illegal.’
Whether he meant it or not, his response said a lot about his character. He was basically advertising the fact that he might steal or embezzle if the opportunity presented itself. So, that was enough for us to pass on him as a candidate.
In the end, I think he was overconfident and wasn’t thinking when he spoke. That’s a big deal when you’re working with the general public. If you can’t control yourself in an interview, then how can we trust you to do the same when you’re working with customers and clientele?”
He Downgraded Himself
“Many years ago I was on a panel interviewing several candidates for a pretty desirable job at MLB. We were mostly interviewing recent college graduates, but one of the candidates had an MBA from Chicago. His resume said he had been an English major (at Amherst if I recall correctly).
So I asked him to say a little bit about the experience of having been an English major and then attending a very quantitatively oriented business school like Chicago. I thought it would be interesting to hear him talk about ways of learning, working with information in different ways, etc.
Instead, he spent the next couple of minutes apologizing for having been an English major! He went on and on about how sorry he was that he had chosen a worthless major like English, and how glad he was that he had gone to business school and learned something useful.
I was dumbstruck.
So was everyone else on the hiring panel.
In addition to all that, his stint in Chicago had given him some very unrealistic ideas about the kind of salary escalation he could expect.
On paper, if you had asked any of us beforehand, we would have said that he was head and shoulders superior to the other candidates. But after that interview, there was no way we were going to hire him.”
Close Call
“The last question I always ask in any interview is, ‘Is there anything you’d like to know about us that we haven’t already told you?’ It’s an easy, casual way to wind the interview down, and we sometimes get a response that reflects very favorably on the candidate and makes a good impression.
About a year ago, I was interviewing a woman whose resume was a little weak, because she didn’t have a very lengthy employment history. There were a couple of gaps and some unusually short tenures. But she was young, had good explanations for her spotty employment history, and had some solid educational qualifications. She also had a very good interview. She had no way of knowing it at the time, but I had already decided I was going to hire her. That last question was just a formality; I’d already made up my mind.
But… that last question…
She furrowed her brow and looked very intense and focused for a moment before saying, ‘Mmm… Well, I’m wondering about your attendance policy.’
‘Sure,’ I said. Not an unreasonable question; it showed foresight and attention to detail. ‘What can I tell you about it?’
She looked very nervous, and asked, ‘Well… how many days can I miss without calling in before I’m fired?’
So, I gave her a brief but comprehensive explanation of how our sick days, vacation days, PTO days, and floating holidays worked, and our procedure for calling in when there was an emergency. She looked a little uncomfortable, and then said, ‘No… I mean, how many days can I not come to work without calling in before I’m fired?’
I wasn’t sure I understood what she was asking, so I asked, ‘Do you mean… just… not come in? Just not show up? At all?’
‘Yes!’ she said, ‘That’s it. If I don’t come to work, or call in, how many days is it before I’m fired?’
I said, ‘Well, I don’t usually get asked that, but our normal policy is three days of no-call/no-show is considered job abandonment – which is voluntary termination.’
Somehow, this did not seem to reassure her. She looked apprehensive, and said, ‘Well… Okay… thanks.’
I asked her if she had any more questions, and she said no, and clearly seemed preoccupied. I escorted her to the parking lot, shook her hand, and said she’d be hearing from us in a few days. Then I walked straight back to my office, called HR, and said, ‘Forget it.’
I understand that people have lives, things come up unexpectedly, people get sick, etc. There are a number of reasons that people may have to miss work. I understand that, and if you’re one of my people, I’ll work with you on whatever issues you need help with. But as an operations manager, part of my responsibility is to make the best, and the wisest, hiring decisions I can with the information that is available to me. If the only thing you really want to know about the company is how many days in a row you can not come to work without even calling to let me know what is going on, you’re giving me a strong indication that you’re going to be an attendance problem. Unless you’re an absolute superstar candidate, I’m going to have to give that position to someone who doesn’t flash such a bright red flag.”
Red Flag
“On paper, this kid had everything going for him. He had an impressive resume and credentials, plus he was a close friend of someone in our company and recommended by him.
Also, our company was only 35 people at the time, and we were eager to recruit to expand our operations.
This interview was conducted by another manager and me. We gave him a business case to solve, and he did ok but not great. We then started to delve into his past experiences.
He told us about this great startup where he worked, where the founder was so smart. As I recall, the founder had really great connections and had consulting background. The candidate started there with an internship. The startup was growing fast, and the founder started recruiting McKinsey grads to help him with the business.
We, therefore, asked the candidate why he left the startup. As the first intern and one of the first employees, he could have negotiated a good deal, or at least have an interesting position in the company.
His first answer was a bit arrogant but fine. He told us how he used to be just under the founder, and he didn’t want more buffers/new hires in between.
Both the other manager and I sensed something, and we remained silent for a couple of seconds. That’s when the interview got ruined. The candidate sensed he hadn’t really convinced us, and suggested he knew why he didn’t get a job in the startup.
I could smell a lie coming.
He suggested the founder was threatened by him because he was smart and knew too much about the company.
I actually laughed out loud. The founder was hiring McKinsey grads and was afraid of an intern who didn’t impress us thus far. Unbelievable.
The interview went downhill from there. The candidate didn’t understand why I laughed and we finished a couple of questions. The other manager and I were unanimous in our decision to reject him.
A while later, the colleague the candidate was friends with came to me and asked why we didn’t recruit him. I told him the business case wasn’t convincing enough and the candidate wouldn’t have fit in our culture.
Apparently, the candidate complained about us, about how we didn’t know how to interview, and that we discriminated against him because we weren’t from the same background (he was a spoiled rich kid).
As most of our employees were from humble upbringings, we definitely dodged a bullet.”