No question job interviews are stressful: the pressure is high, the palms are sweaty, the tags are rustling around inside the jacket you'll return tomorrow. It's nearly impossible to not make a single mistake while trying to convince people to help you pay your rent in return for your time and soul. But there are certain no-no's we all know to avoid—well, not all of us, apparently.
Hiring managers and people who have been responsible for hiring new employees are sharing their most "WTF moments" from job interviews. Here are 18 stories about potential employees who messed up interviews in hilarious and horrifying ways—but, hey, at least they made an impression!
1.) From blatentpoetry:
Hiring for a Senior Dev position. Had a telephone interview and she seemed confident and competent so I flew her down for an on site interview. She calls not me but the front desk reception and says she can’t drive in a big city and needs a car to pick her up and she refuses to get the rental car we reserved (before Uber/Lyft). Call is transferred to me and I tell her to take the train (Atlanta, MARTA) no, she says, too scary. I tell her to go to the taxi stand and take that, nope afraid of taxis. She wants a corp limo to pick her up and nothing else will do. She is adamant. I put her on hold, have a chat with my boss who says just send her home, shes too much work if she can’t even handle this. I tell her thank you for taking the time to fly down but not even our own VPs get that treatment and to go ahead and change your ticket to fly home, now. She then starts telling me she will take a taxi, etc. i said please don’t bother it will be a waste of everyone’s time, thank you, goodbye.
Not once when setting up her travel plans did she say she needed assistance getting from the airport. It was explained to her she would pick up a rental car at the airport. She was fine with it. No idea WTF she was thinking but ain’t nobody got time for dat nonsense!
2.) From xantyrn:
I was preforming a video interview with a candidate. They were clearly in a large room/bedroom, with most of it visible in the background, but it was clean so I didn't mind. In the back right corner was a closed door. About 7 minutes into the interview I see the door open slightly and some dude poke his head in, see that his roommate/girlfriend was in an interview then close the door. Not a big deal, it happens. I ask my next question and let the candidate respond. But then, about 30 seconds later I see the door slowly open again, only this time the dude comes crawling out the bottom. He continues to crawl across the floor making his way to the opposite side of the room. I assume he thought he was out of the cameras FOV, but he was clearly visible. He gets to the far end of the room and turns to fiddle with something ass in the air facing the camera. Finally, he finishes up with whatever he was doing and makes is way back and out the door.
I know I should have stopped the candidate and had her deal with the dude, but it was so funny to watch I had to let it play out. I could barely contain my laughter and after the interview finished I lost it. She got the job though, and from what I remember was a great employee.
3.) From accidentalhorse:
She cried three times during the interview about how much she hated her current job. My coworker had to get up and grab a box of tissues for her. When she finally calmed down, she informed us that she'll need a special desk chair due to an injury she sustained at her current job, and yes, she did have a workers compensation court case against said job and she hoped to "win big". No one had said anything about hiring her, she just made an assumption that she got the job I guess.
The icing on the cake was that she was interviewing for a workers compensation job, at a firm where we only represent employers, never injured people. While that doesn't influence hiring decisions, talking at length about her current case against her boss was just a weird thing to bring up. That and crying...
4.) From Safraninflare:
I hire student (university) workers. One of my questions is “Tell me about a time at work where you made a mistake, and how you fixed it.”
This kid had no prior work experience, so I modified the question to remove the “at work” part. I thought he’d tell me about fucking up at school or at home and no. He told me about the time where he ripped his pants in gym class in the fourth grade. He didn’t tell me how he fixed the situation either, so I’m assuming his pants are ripped to this day.
This kid was a goldmine of what not to do in an interview, tbh. He did not get the job.
5.) From ejsandstrom:
We have a very simple “pre-employment” test. If you have been in our industry for more than a year you should get 100%. Some times we even give it as an “at home” test.
We had one guy that took his test home had it for over a week. He brought it to the formal interview and got 90% of the questions wrong. Even though according to his resume he was an all star and knew everything.
He had an excuse for every wrong answer to even the most widely known questions in our industry.
It would be the equivalent of saying you have been laying sod for 20 years, and then put the green side down.
He didn’t get the job.
6.) From BuffelBek:
Obligatory not a hiring manager, but I still had to interview some candidates.
Some of the walls in the office were painted a vague brownish colour. Partway during the interview this guy starts looking around with a really spaced out look and says: "This office really reminds me of a cardboard box. But not in a bad way. Like the kind of box that you put things in, you know?"
He then decided that he didn't want the job and left before the interview was over.
7.) From Sharkattackr:
The strangest ever was a man telling us all about his mom’s Alzheimer’s, talking crap about our company, and getting upset we didn’t offer him the position on the spot. It was a wild ride beginning to end.
8.) From DefinitelyYoda:
To start the interview, I asked him to tell us (3 people) a little bit about himself.
35 minutes later, he stopped talking. Usually people answer this question in 1-5 minutes. It was incredibly awkward and I was tempted to interrupt him but then truly wanted to see how long he would go.
9.) From Saddoo:
I was interviewing for a salesperson position. I asked all the candidates to tell a joke, just to see their storytelling skills. This guy told a joke that included swallowing semen, puking and gang rape. It was so out of place!
10.) From lovelanguage_sarcasm:
When she listed all of her ex boyfriends that currently worked there, and said she couldn’t wait to see the look on their faces when she showed up to work. This was in the first 3 minutes of the interview so I wasn’t even close to offering the job yet. I cut the interview right there and sent her on her way.
11.) From refreshing_username:
In a case study interview, I prefaced everything by saying "Look, this case is designed to see how you break a problem down and analyze it. I won't give you enough information up front to solve it right away. You'll have to ask questions to get more information. The final answer is important, but more important is you showing me your analytical process. This might take 15 to 30 minutes."
Candidate then listened to the 30-second exposition of the case study, which as promised did not include enough information to solve it.
Her immediate response was "I think the answer is X." I asked why she thought so, and she said "that's just what my judgment tells me." I asked if she could quantify how she came up with X, but she just pointed back to judgment and intuition.
My pen went down, I leaned back in my chair, and I wondered how to politely bring the interview to an immediate close.
12.) From tittyelf:
I did a phone interview with a guy and he seemed really excited and very friendly. He seemed to be relatively new to the field, but we were willing to give him a chance. I invited him to come in for an in-person interview. My manager and I were doing this second interview, and when I called him in, he gave me a huge hug and proceeded to talk to me like I was his best friend. As a 27 year old woman, I was incredibly uncomfortable and froze up. At the end of the interview, we told him we would reach out to him within the next couple of weeks to let him know the outcome.
After the interview, my manager asked if I knew him, and I said I definitely did not. His interview was not great either, and he was not a good fit for the job. My manager was the one who had to call him to let him know he didn't get the job. However, he proceeded to call my phone every day that week and left me long voice mails. Most of the times he'd ask about his interview, but sometimes he'd say things like "Hey girl! How are things going? I was thinking, if I get hired we should hang out!". It freaked me out, and I had my manager call him early to give him the news that he did not get the job. The calls did not stop, and I just kept deleting his voice mails without listening. My manager and I were so disturbed by his persistence that we went to HR for help, and they must have done something because the calls stopped after that.
13.) From BoopThisIsMySam:
On a team hiring to replace our Regional Manager. This guy...he was really good, but he kept bringing up his vacation in the Finger Lakes. Like, every 4 sentences. "Just making sure the Finger Lakes thing is okay". I mean, for real?
14.) From gmabarrett:
Had a candidate who came in and said how hot my admin was and asked if she was single or “open to freaky Fridays”
15.) From fievelm:
Hiring IT:
Candidate seemed a bit off to start with. He made a lot of claims about experience in the field, like "writing apps for companies" but couldn't name a single programming language, couldn't explain DHCP or DNS, etc.
I could tell it was going nowhere and just decided to pad the interview with some casual questions and asked him why he had moved to our state from California.
That's when it happened. It was like he had this speech geared and ready to go. He started ranting about the snowflakes in California that couldn't handle his opinions, went on a political tirade and claimed the liberals drove him out of the state. How happy he was to be with like minded folks "like us", etc etc.
I sent him back to reception to turn his guest badge in, and 10 mins later our CFO calls me direct and says "You will not hire that man.". Apparently the receptionist wasn't at her desk, so he wandered to the CFO's office. She was on the phone so he stood in her doorway and stared at her for 5mins while she was on the phone.
Oh, and the kicker is that my state is one of the most liberal in the country. We haven't had a Republican governor since the 70's. We were the 1st to legalize marijuana for crying out loud.
16.) From Boxman75:
I set up an interview for an acquaintance's nephew with a company looking to hire 30 college students for summer work. The nephew's major and the line of work this company performed seemed to mesh perfectly, and I knew the hiring manager personally, so it seemed like a great fit.
A couple weeks later the acquaintance emails asking about the job. So I hit up my hiring manager friend and the conversation went something like this.
Me - Hey how'd the round of hiring go?
HR - Great, needed to fill 30 spaces and only had to do 31 interviews to fill them.
Me - Oh cool, so was Paul X one of them?
HR - Oh him, yeah well... uhh.. he was naked during the interview so we declined.
Me - What?!?! Are you serious? I find it hard to believe he would show up to an interview nude.
HR - Well it was a skype interview, and when we brought up his video feed he was laying in bed nude.
Me - Oh, well maybe he thought you couldn't see him. Maybe he thought it was just an audio meeting.
HR - We told him we could see him and he said "sorry" then covered up with a sheet. We asked if he wanted to reschedule and he said no he was good. So yeah we decided to pass.
Sorry Paul.
17.) From UnexpectedBrisket:
Asked a (male) applicant about a few specific projects he'd done with people I've met. His comments about male collaborators were perfectly normal and respectful. His comments about female collaborators were dismissive, condescending, and inappropriately familiar.
I know there are lots of sexist people out there, but... not being able to conceal it for a 30-minute interview?
18.) From cutlassandclean:
Not a hiring manager exactly but have been with the company long enough that they let me run the occasional interview for the delivery drivers that work under me. There was a guy who came in and already seemed off when asking for an application. They handed him one because why not and he came back the next day and handed it back filled out, minimally. Then kept asking "So when is my interview?" They just told them they would call him when they figured it out but after ghosting him for a couple days he began calling up everyday asking when he could come in for an interview. They said I should just sit down with him and tell him we aren't hiring and we will let him know if anything changes. So I sat down in a booth and waited for this guy to come in, then I see through the window him getting out of his car, in our work uniform. See we give you all that stuff your first day and he hasn't even had an interview. He comes in and sits down opposite me and we exchange pleasantries and he asks me if I like his uniform, I say yeah but question who gave it to him and he tells me he made it. I ask him why he made a uniform if we give him a few and he told me it was because we hadn't given him one, he also started being very rude after this question so I guess I hurt his feelings. I told him what I was supposed to tell him but he also didn't have a functioning car but 2 days a week and somehow wanted full time hours so I denied him for that reason but yeah definitely strange at the least.