25 Job Interview Stories That Range From Hilarious To Totally Unhinged
Article created by: Mantas KaÄŤerauskas
For most people, a job interview is pretty stressful. Sweaty palms, elevated heart rate, racing thoughts, and confusion about where to place your eyes are just a few possible outcomes. As one discussion on Reddit shows, things can get much spicier.
Recently, a person who goes on the platform by the nickname Arpitaintech posted a question on r/RecruitingHellasking its members to share the funniest or craziest experiences they’ve had during these private meetings, and received hundreds of stories.
I had an interview for an engineering position. The lady grilled me about completely unrelated stuff and I finally had it when she said “sell me this pen”. I was like “I’m not a sales person I’m an engineer” and she flipped out and said I’m unqualified and bad at dealing with stressful situations and I calmly said “well I’m dealing with you right now”. She was not amused but her co interviewer was trying not to laugh. The workers in the back looked miserable and I had already decided I didn’t want to work for her at that point.
Not me but a friend was applying for a Christmas temp job and the last question was “Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?” Her reply was “No. It’s a Christmas classic”.
She got the job obviously.
He asked me all the “wrong” questions.
are you in a serious relationship? do you want kids? are you religious? how do you lean politically?
then told me all about the problems with his marriage and why they’re in couples counseling. says jesus was their saving grace. he kept pushing that i would change my mind on kids once my “biological clock” kicked in. he admitted he was reluctant to hire women because they usually put work second to their families. then also stated he wanted to hire a women to help keep the office neat and tidy.
and last, but not least..
he gave me an offer for an “administrative assistant” role. i applied for a civil engineering position.
I was interviewing at a company and they asked where I saw myself in 5 years. I have an answer about moving up in position to maybe manage a small team. They said that’s not at all what they’re looking for, they want someone in that position for 10 years, so I knew I wasn’t a good fit, so I had fun in the rest of my interview with them. The hr person asked how I was comparing companies, I told her at Capital one they had a small tree house, at epic systems they had a huge treehouse. I looked at her very seriously and asked how big their tree house was, you’ve never seen an adult so sad to say they don’t have a tree house.
Was interviewing to the local wine shop-bar as a Marketing Manager. After 2 rounds of interview, they told me that I will receive a questionnaire about my personality for them to learn more about me.
I thought ok.
They sent a 300 questions clinical psychology test. It had questions about relationship with my parents, my fears or trauma. I was really weirded out and refused to proceed as I don’t want a potential employer to have a record of my psychological issues.
I was asked to come up with changes for the production process while the interviewer vehemently refused to provide any details about the clients, machines, current processes and products. We spent half an hour of me providing vague explanations to cover as many bases as possible, the interviewer asking to be more specific, me asking for details to be more specific rather than generalizing, the interviewer arguing that providing any informations would make it too easy and me getting back to the first step until the cycle repeated.
It was truly the most bizarre interview that I have ever had. When he asked to be more specific for the fourth time and still refused to provide any details, I had enough and ended it.
“If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?”
I was interviewing for an analyst position so I went for a “decision tree” Got the job
I once had an interview for a company which it turns out, was behind charging prisoners families the collect call money when the prisoner called them.
They had a laptop where I was supposed to take a proficiency with Linux test. This was an interview at 7 am btw. My first red flag. I was greeted by a password protected root prompt and not given the password. Iknew the commands by heart to drop to single user via editing the grub prompt and bypass the password protection since I worked in a data center and spent a lot of time doing it. Their faces fell. They were actually disappointed they didn’t get to treat me like I was stupid for not being able to pass their little test. I completed the rest of the technical questions from a command prompt with no net access and all manpages removed (but not the info pages, real geniuses these guys) and then I surprised them by asking about the work environment. Which consisted of the CEO sitting where he could see everyone’s screens and micro managing every thing that was done. A relatively huge for the time database where they made changes on the live DB because the CEO was too cheap to have a testing environment. Ragged out chairs that were stained, and single underpowered dell system attached to the cheapest monitor they could get. The vibe from everyone except the eric trump clone interviewing me was one of misery.
I needed work badly and I was crushed in a way when I was rejected, but in the end I know I really dodged a bullet. The cherry on top was the way they mentioned being a christian company every 30 seconds. What’s more christlike than bullying applicants, robbing the families of criminals coincidentally among the most impoverished, and worshiping wealth for yourself?
But he the owner/ceo was rich so I guess a prosperity gospel church would give him a big ol thumbs up? It’s been 25 years and I still think of that place occasionally and shudder.
I slept through an interview, completely forgetting about it. In my defense it was sort of sick. Only realized when I was looking at my calendar that evening. I sent an apology email the next business day.
I ended up getting the job.
Not a question but when I tried to get a job that would involve a fair amount of driving, I half jokingly wrote down ‘drivers license’ under work experience. My interviewer took one look at the application and said “valid drivers license, good. You’re already ahead of the other guy”.
A potential employer scheduled an interview with my brother… without telling him.
They were upset when he didn’t show up, even after he explained the situation. “The best they could do” was to reschedule it for later that day. They did not understand why he was unwilling to immediately drop everything and get on a last-second flight across the country to attend.
He politely asked that they not contact him again.
“If you were a brick in a wall which one would you be?”
I’m sorry, I didn’t know I was interviewing with Pink Floyd.
The interviewer complimented me on something on my resume and I got excited and flustered, went to push my glasses up and stuck my finger right up my nose instead.
My dad was at an interview at a mall when a brawl broke out. People were throwing chairs and pulling guns. There was blood everywhere. My dad thought it would look impressive to the interviewer if he tried to intervene. Spoiler alert, he stood no chance and it did not impress anyone. But he was on tv for it!
The job entailed a lot of filing of papers, so I got asked “How do you best file things in folders alphabetically?”
I was like “Uh… with a folder for each letter, and then put the folders in alphabetical order…”
She said “Good… good…” and jotted down some notes.
I was at an interview for a job at an archival library in London. Three interviewers and I were crammed into a tiny room, and it wasn’t going well. I had to take the train in starting at 5 am and I had a bad headache. The interview seemed to drone on.
Then the fire alarm went off. The interviewers tried to ignore it but someone opened the door and told us it was a real incident and we had to evacuate. We went outside and, it being London, the rain was chucking down. I was the only one who’d brought an umbrella so all four of us had to huddle under it. To say it was awkward was an understatement. None of the three said a word during the 15 minutes we were out there, which felt like 15 hours. At one point someone banged on the doors to the library and demanded to be let in, and the arriving fire department had to tell him to calm down.
Finally a couple firefighters emerged from the building to tell us the coast was clear, and we all trooper back in. Amazingly, the three interviewers wanted to go on for another 15 minutes, even though we’d all been in there for 45 minutes already and it was pretty obvious I wasn’t getting the job.
And no, I didn’t get the job, which at that point was something of a relief.
I once interviewed for Costa Crociere (cruises) for an analyst position.
I arrived at the entrance desk of their HQ 15 minutes before the interview and checked in. Waited for around 20 minutes then a very gentle guy came, led me to a meeting room and started asking me about my hobbies to brake the ice. Around 10 minutes in he asked me: “how would you describe your style?”.
“My….style?”
“Yes…your cooking style”
“Normal…I guess. I can cook some decent stuff but I don’t really love cooking so much”
He was expecting another candidate for a sous-chef position that did not show up and confused him for me. While the guy I actually had to meet came to the reception later and was thinking I left after checking in.
Midway through the interview I decided I didn’t want to work with these people.
So I pivoted to talking about my favorite movie, The Exorcist, complete with sound effects.
This was actually a few weeks ago! It was for a corporate receptionist position and I was interviewed by the loss prevention guy or whatever. First red flag was him telling me that the position falls more under loss prevention and they only post it as “receptionist” because they “get the wrong types of people” if they post it otherwise. Ok……..
Then he goes on to tell me he isn’t like other hiring managers and that his style is unique. He tells me he only asks one question to his interviewees. He then proceeds to ask me “do you love to win or do you hate to lose?” It was bizarre.
Then he talked about himself for the entire rest of the hour. Literally all about himself, his job duties, stories from past work experiences, literally anything and everything about himself.
Then he asks if I have any questions for him. I had prepared a long list of potential questions they would ask and thoughtful responses I could give. I also prepared a few questions for the interviewer. When I asked him those questions he sat and waited for more. I told him how I had been prepared for him to ask me questions and had only prepared a few for him. He told me if he was doing his job right that he wouldn’t need to ask a lot of questions.
He also was drinking a can of soda the entire interview. It was so freaking weird. I got the sense that he already knew who he was going to hire and was just going through with my interview as a formality. So he wasted my time and energy preparing for an interview that basically never happened.
I was meeting a friend’s brother for a freelance opportunity. I didn’t want a job at the time cuz I’d recently quit one and needed my schedule on my own terms.
This guy suddenly starts trying to stress-test me. Obviously I’m doing incredibly well, but I’m like, “Sir, isn’t this a freelance opportunity?”
He kept saying that “the job is not hard” and then made me tour the whole office, and then low-balled me. Finally he gets me to meet the CEO person, and I mention that this is a very surprising interview. They’re like, we have a contract already and to save face I gotta tell them I’ll think about it, but I had to reprimand the guy later cuz not only was it a very low offer it came with an unpaid probation – on a 6-day working week.
Another time these people made me come in for 4 interviews, the 4th was meant to be just 20 minutes according to them, and it ended up being a 1.5hr surprise online test. Then they low-balled me, too. Literally had the VP beg me to join and had to sternly decline for wasting my time.
A third time they made us sit out for 90 minutes as a “stress test”. I left as soon as they told me I’d “passed.”.
