Weirdest or Most Memorable Job Interview

annr

annr

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Nov 15, 2006
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After answering questions about my work history last week this old memory came to me. It always struck me as odd.

Out of the blue I got a call at home from someone wishing to hire me to work in an unfamiliar town about 15 miles outside the city. Since my car would not be ready for about a month we made a plan to meet in front of a hospital located on public transportation in that town.

I arrived on time and waited at the curb in front of the hospital. A black Lincoln Towncar pulls up and I see that the driver, an older man, is motioning for me to get into the car. There I am in the passenger's seat thinking that he would drive me to the facility where he would conduct the interview. Instead he tells me that he just needed to lay eyes on me, takes my resume, hands me a packet of information and arranges it so that I have easy access to the job.

It turned out to be an OK job with pension benefits and very little hassle.
 
I show up for an engineering job interview at the dot of 7:00 AM (per interviewer's preference). Normally I'm more of a 9-to-7 kind of guy so this was a hassle for me. He shows up around 8:15 without so much as a shrug of apology and brings me in for an interview without so much as an offer of coffee. He harangues me about how hard it is to find "dedicated" workers who will put in 80 hour work weeks without expecting to be payed more than their base (40 hour) salary. That is one of the reasons he was reluctant to interview me since some engineers coming from an aerospace environment think they should be compensated for working over 50 or 60 hours a week. I mentioned that sometimes comp time helped when crunches came. He didn't think that was appropriate either. I was getting a caffeine withdrawal headache at about this time and was ready to bow out. Before that I asked what had ever become of my old friend Cy who had gone to work for the firm a year or two earlier. This guy was rather put off by the mention of Cy. He said that he had started out Ok and had stepped up to the long hours in a very promising manner, but then he had suddenly died of a heart attack on the job. The guy was actually upset at how Cy's death from work stress had set back his project.

This story really made me mad and sad because Cy was a heck of nice guy. I thought that I would never go to work for a company that bad...but this is engineering. Back in 2001 I was driven to work 80 hour work weeks to finish a critical project on an accelerated schedule. I even pulled three all-nighters in one week. It turned out that the critical deadline was that they wanted to lay me off. They pretty much wanted to lay off anyone who was over 45. I got a commendation for completing the project in time to save the company a bunch of money and a few days later I got laid off. Within about 3 months I had my heart attack, at my desk at a new employers. When I had it I did not yet qualify to be on the medical insurance of the new employer and I was without life insurance for the first time in 30 years...but I digress.

It is a real bad sign if they have trouble interviewing you because they don't have a free minute to talk to you.
 
This happened to a friend of mine. He was interviewing for a position with some company for some HR job. The morons in this company thought it would be interesting if the prospective employees interviewed eachother...what a bunch of B.S. my friend thought and walked out of the interview...thus ruining the plan...with a odd number of applicants...they kicked an additional person out who hollerd at him in the parking lot that he had blown his job interview..my friend replied ...do you really want to work for a company that treats people like lab rats and watches the results...

Screw that..
 
A long time ago I interviewed for an engineering job at a large corporation [aerospace] .First thing they did was give me a simple math test which any HS graduate should pass .That steamed me but they said they give it to everyone. Then a series of interviews carefully alloted as to time .Each kept looking at his watch. Lunchtime came and I thought I'd get a few minutes to relax. No, it was just another interview. When I got home I couldn't wait to call the employment agency and tell them 'no way' if they treat you that way before you're hired what will it be like after ???
 
I'd finished my 8 years in the military at Fort Bragg and was ready to head back to Pa. My house was sold....all my stuff packed for shipping when I get a phone call from a buddy in Florida. He told be he worked for a DOD contracting company that had some opening positions on Fort Bragg and they needed people with my clearance and skill sets. I told him this would have been good info to have a month ago but I was ready to roll home. He insisted on a quick interview with the VP that just happened to at Ft. Bragg. I met the VP the next night at a local restaurant/bar. The VP was an ex special forces guy with several tours in Vietnam. He asked me if I wanted a drink, I said sure, and he ordered 2 scotch on the rocks. He never gave me the opportunity to choose. The interview consisted of 1 1/2 hours of drinking scotch listening to war stories. I enjoyed the conversation and drinks. As the evening was wrapping up he slid an envelope over to me. It was an offer letter for a position making 3 times what I made as Staff Sergeant. Best interview I ever had.....I had to rent a house and unpack all my stuff but it was worth it.
 
Well..... Several years ago I moved back to Fresno from Ft. Lauderdale , at the time my specialty was consulting/networking/repair of Apple computers , not for Apple mind you , I just ate, drank and slept Macs.

Anyway , my best buddy worked part time consulting at a payroll company , the boss wanted a full timer but my friend declined , why you ask ?
Because the boss was just a little bit of a nut.

So my buddy recommends me ( not telling me how much of a nut this guy was ) and I go in for the interview.
The boss seemed like a normal older guy , a bit eccentric ( everything in the office was painted a different shade of blue and he carried a swagger stick and no , Im not joking. lol ) but the pay was good , I was one of three guys in an office full of nice looking girls and nothing else was popping up so I took the job.

I still remember one of the last things he said in the interview was " Todd , I like to run this place like a country club , we have fun , get our work done and some fridays we go home early "

Awesome , I thought !!

That lasted about a year and from that point on , my next two years are some of the most off the wall work stories I have , this guy was a bona fide nutcase.

I still miss the office girls though... :D
 
Walked into the boss' office.
Sat in the allocated chair across the desk from him.
Looked at the desk top.
Every sheet of paper was aligned square to the blotter.
His pencils were sharpened to perfect points, arranged in size order, again perfectly parallel to each other and square to the blotter.
I began to worry.
The job was to do mechanicals for baseball cards (this is BC...Before Computers).
T-Square & Triangle stuff.
I agree to a 'try-out' to see if I can make the grade.
So I'm ready rule up some boards. He tells me he's looking for 1/64" accuracy.
I follow him to the to the back of the studio, thru a door and into the air conditioning room. The room that contains the machinery. We almost have to shout to be heard.
There is another poor soul in their working at a drawing board with headphones on, he nods.
The drawing board was so bad, and the room so noisey, my lamp vibrated off my table and crashed to the floor.
It aint looking good.
I finish the boards, bring them to him to be reviewed. He checks them with a clear plastic grid and harrangues me about my inaccuacies. There were very few & it was dark lol
Then in a condescending manner offers me $8/hour. (1/3 - 1/2 of the going rate & I'm being generous).
I asked if I'd be sitting in the studio with the other artists.
He said no, in the AC room with the headphones guy.

I declined the offer.
He was actually surprised.

The hour & a half train ride home (Brooklyn to Queens thru 1/2 of Manhattan), along with the rice & beans for dinner, were never so good.
 
I got a call from a major defense contractor's HR person saying he'd got my resume from some recruiter and I was EXACTLY what the were looking for and would I come immediately! Well, of course, I went for an interview.

The HR person greeted me and reitterated how I was perfect for them and exactly what they needed.

My first interview with a hiring manager went like this:

Manager: Ahhhh... do you know anything about crytography?

Me: No.

Manager: Oh... so... we've got an hour, do we? How about this weather we're having?



My second interview with a hiring manager went like this:

Manager: Ahhhh... do you know anything about pattern recognition?

Me: No.

Manager: Oh... so... we've got an hour, do we? How about this weather we're having?


My third interview with a hiring manager went like this:

Manager: Ahhh... so, do you know anything about Kalman filters?

Me: No.

Manager: Oh... so... we've got an hour, do we? How about this weather we're having?



My next interview with a hiring manager went like this:

Manager: So, what do you know about wavelet-based image compression?

Me: Not much.

Manager: Ahhh... how about this weather we're having?



After eight of these interviews, the HR manager picked me up and took me back to his office and just gushed about how wonderful I am and how good I'd be for their company and on and on and on.

The next day, I flew home.

The day after that, the HR manager called and offered me a position. As you can imagine, I said, "Thanks, but no thanks."
 
I once drove about 50 miles for an interview for a database adminstrator position. About two minutes into the interview we both realized that we were talking about two different jobs. The position the interviewer was trying to fill involved doing financial audits and reporting the results. Database administrator? We both had a good laugh and the rest of the interview was along the "How about this weather we're having?" line.
 
These stories brought back the time when I was recruited as part of a husband-wife team to fill two vacancies at a University in the sun-belt.

We received a phone call inviting us, all expenses paid, to interview over a 3 day/2 night interval. On paper we looked qualified and the opportunity to escape New England winters was tempting enough that we agreed.

Upon arrival we went through a series of interviews starting with the President of the university, next the Dean, Director, faculty, students.; taught two classes, took in a concert; rehearsed and performed a concert; went to lunches and dinners.................They even took us house hunting, $300,000 homes (this was the early '90's). :eek: I'm thinking how would we afford a house like that on teachers' pay.

At the end of it all the Director was beaming, offered us the jobs and told us the salaries. Off we went.

Well magically the employment offers and salary were either rescinded or declared to have been never mentioned depending on the conversation. Reasons cited were:
1. one of us did not have a doctorate (rather 10 years teaching at a well-known music school superior to this one). This was clear on our resumes sent before we flew there.
2.the job was advertised incorrectly and they needed to hire two women or a minority.

I didn't know which reason was worse. So I ask the guy, "You mean to tell me that if Itzhak Perlman (whom I didn't think had a doctorate, maybe an honorary one) applied to teach violin at your school you would not hire him. The answer: "Yes." What a liar or fool.

As far as the woman/minority comment I couldn't believe that they would say that either so I contacted the EEOC. The lawyer was quite receptive but as I thought about I didn't want anything else to do with these idiots. That was the end of that.
 
When I was "interviewing" for the Volunteer FD in the small town I lived in before I left the US, the guys met me in the only decent bar in town and we drank & talked for about three hours. At the end of the evening, they told me they'd be in touch- 3 weeks later, I was offered a slot as a volunteer firefighter. Thought there would be more to it.

When I had just returned from 5 years in Germany, I had big holes in my resume where I was working as a bartender/waiter/cook/tour guide, etc. I was interviewing in NYC and a woman I was interviewing with literally put her elbows on her desk & her chin in her hands and asked me w/ a dreamy expression on her face: "Tell me what it's like in Europe". She had NO interest in hiring me, she just wanted travel stories.

Another one in NYC- this was for a media company- I was waiting for the scheduled interview- arount 10:00 am if memory serves- I sat in the lobby after announcing myself to the receptionist- was told "she'll be right with you". About 45 minutes goes by when this whirlwind of angry woman plows through the front doors, crosses the lobby muttering under her breath while cutting me an over-the-shoulder sneer as she flies by. The receptionist's face reflected the look of someone who would have been at the bottom of a bunker, waiting for the bombs to fall. The mood in the whole office changes- the background chatter ceases- much like one sees in the old films where the intrepid hero says: "listen, the drums have stopped..." This is usually followed by a shower of arrows/spears.
Two minutes later, I am in her office- she has lipstick all over her mouth- guzzling coffee and is PISSED OFF. So I sit there while she uncovers my resume from a pile of paper on her desk- she's seething angry w/ someone or something and I'm getting the brunt of it. Finally she finds my resume and she alternately glowers at me and flits her eyes around the room. Openly Hostile, not focused on the interview at all. I cut the resume short, stating that I didn't think the "fit was right". Felt like I had just gotten out with my life.
 
So I fly up from Los Angeles for an interview in Everett Washington. During the interview everybody is just plain giggling over how perfect a match my recent experience is to what they are using on their project. For old techies I had just finished putting a system together using TMS320C30 DSP's and interfaced through XC3090 FPGA's. When I went into the hiring manager's office he had my favorite engineering management book open on his desk and I talked to him about the parts that I thought were most interesting. I sailed through all of the technical questions.

As part of my interest in how this might play out I found a local real estate agent to point me at some houses. The greater Seattle area is not cheap and I wanted to be able to evaluate salary offers relative to housing costs. I left with the HR recruiter saying this was the best match he'd ever seen.

I got a rejection a few days later. Somebody in the hierarchy decided that I seemed too interested in relocating. They didn't think that I was enough interested in the higher glory of their company to be worth trying out.
 
I have two stories.

The first is when I arrived for the interview and told by the receptionist to wait. After about 45 minutes someone walks by, walks into someones office and says, "I don't know where the guy is he's 45 minutes late!'. I get up and walk over, "Are you waiting for me? I've been here for about 45 minutes." I was there a year and a half, that was probably the least screwed up day I had while working there.

The second is I was having a job interview over the phone and they asked about what projects I had worked on. I happen to mention on I had just finished up and the interviewer says, "Oh that's something, we're working on that same kind of project now. How did you handle this because we've been stuck on that for months?" I said "Yes that was a bit tricky, here's how I handled it." and went on to explain in fairly detailed terms what I did. The interviewer then says well thanks very much for the interview and hangs up immediately. SO I just solved their problem they'd been hung up on, and of course they never called me back.
 
I've been an engineer for close to 30 years now and I've been on at least 100 job interviews. I can keep dishing out memorable interviews for weeks. My worst one was probably my first. I had just received my BS in physics and I go off for an interview at a branch of Hughes. They take me in to a conference room and I am grilled by 5 PhD's. They want me to explain the intricacies of mathematical physics. Explain Green's Theorem, define a Hilbert space... The stress was just amazing. My blood sugar dropped and I literally started to get tunnel vision.

The thing that was weird about this was that the job was for a process engineer. None of the questions touched on chemical engineering or any kind of engineering. Those were the questions I was better prepared to answer. We did a tour of the office and I met a guy who was a process engineer. He was writing specifications on how to apply paint. Clean with this, etch with that, prime with this other stuff, spray on this stuff, and bake thus and so. (I don't think he had to do anything more mathematical than tell time.) This was actually the type of work that I had been doing for a job while I was in school at a local government lab.
 
My most memorable interview was when I was in my last term in college..I was at a recruiting fair and there was this company there that had literally everything I was looking for. The guy had a large office building and offered me a purchasing position with his large nursery that was grossing over a million in tree and shrub sales. The salary was awesome and the benifit package looked great to.We scheduled a further interview the following week. So I borrow my sisters car and drive out to Flint to see this awesome corporate nursery that I was going to work at. Well lo and behold I pull up to the address and there is nothing here but a abandoned half torn down three bedroom ranch home...I am kinda walking around in a daze..thinking..did I just go to the wrong address or city...when the guy pulls up on a three wheel atv...well it seems the office had not been built yet. Nor had the nursery been started...and oh yeah ..the million dollars in corporate landscape accounts had not materialized yet either...but he was hopeful...my first job would be to tear down this dam house and help put up a pole barn where we would work out of..till the office building go built..oh yeah and the salary would come but he could swing six dollars an hour right now...(1986)

I told him thanks for wasting my time and to perform an unnatural sex act that involved sexual intercourse with himself and I stomped off the property...what a moron..
 
About a decade ago I bailed out of higher academia to start teaching high school. My first interview was for a Latin position at a private school in the NY Hudson Valley. The guy interviewing me started by saying that they had a mediocre program and were content with it, and didn't need any young go-getter trying to improve it. He also peppered his language with outrageous profanities during the whole interview. He picked up my resume from the table and threw it back down sighing with disgust several times (even though I have pretty good credentials) and said "well, you can have the job if you want, I guess." The other thing was that, throughout the meeting, he kept cleaning out his ears with his keys! I thought he was trying to start his head.

I declined the offer.
 
mete said:
.First thing they did was give me a simple math test which any HS graduate should pass .That steamed me but they said they give it to everyone.
Click to expand...

Imagine this: I was shown a photo array and asked to identify the following: chicken, fish, steak, hamburger...and I had been eating error-free for so many years.:D
---------------------------
Here's an exit interview of sorts:

Phone rings. It's my former boss. I had recently resigned and he had one question: Could my successor use my SSN? "She's from China and her work papers only allow her to work at conservatory X, not this one."

"What? You got to be kidding me, Good-bye."
 
I've never had an exit interview. I am currently looking to leave my current job that I started in September, and I have to say, I hope I get one. Now that interview was fantastic and professionally conducted. Unfortunately, what I was told during it did not accurately describe the job I was hired for.
 
Foilist said:
I've never had an exit interview. I am currently looking to leave my current job that I started in September, and I have to say, I hope I get one. Now that interview was fantastic and professionally conducted. Unfortunately, what I was told during it did not accurately describe the job I was hired for.
Click to expand...

Maybe you better tell them in Latin so you don't get in trouble down the line.:)

Interestingly the single largest problem I hear from family and friends is the one that you just described: "what I was told during it [ the interview] did not accurately describe the job I was hired for."


A good friend of mine with an MBA from Cornell was hired by a major company to work in Paris. Initially she was doing some interesting, appropriate work--the kind of thing she moved there to do. Gradually duties changed: management says come in on weekends, go to company parties and activities, park patrons' cars wearing weird costumes...... I can tell you she was not amused.

Another friend, soured by a college teaching job, decided that he was going to get everything in writing (duties, computer, phone, desk, chair, window, door, salary, assistants.....) at his next job. This seemed to help a little but he still had his share of battles for several years.

Good luck.
 
If I can toss a med school interview on the bonfire...

Semimajor university med school, one I'll bet a buck the Americans here have heard of, and they pulled out all the possible platitudes for the school in their materials.

I get there, and things get interesting. Their "completed in November 2006" new building was far from finished, in February 2007. The interview days are simple- 10 people start the day, with tours and the like, and then split off with one per interviewer in the afternoon.

The presentation, though... man, if I weren't an Ohio resident, the errors would have maybe fooled me. Oldest Uni in the state... no (not by a number of years). Biggest Octoberfest outside Munich... no. Biggest med school in the state.... ever hear of Ohio State (number 1) or Toledo (number 2)?

My mood and desire to go there are both souring by the minute, but I figured that maybe the tours would be better. Nope. The parts I saw that looked unfinished were the good ones.

Interview? The guy said "Tell me about yourself" and resumed surfing the Web, not even looking over at me. I talked for about 10 minutes, hitting the good talk points- why medicine, why my undergrad, and so on- and never got so much as a grunt.

Walked out, and decided that if I got accepted, I would decline even if it meant I'd take a year off. Got in to my first choice school and it fits like a good pair of jeans. :D
 
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