What's the worst interview you've ever had?

[No2politics]

Wasnt happy. I was single at the time and he said he couldnt believe how a young single lad wouldnt want to move to london.

A young single lad on contractor money in London. He had a point

[SpontaneousOrder]

I spent nearly an hour in an interview / paperwork filling out session to join the TA when I'd only turned up for an open-day.
I turned up with the invite in hand, and no one knew anything about it. After a while the guy showing me around gave me to some old lady behind a desk to look after because he had to be somewhere else, and eventually after being really confused as to why she was getting all arsey with me for not recollecting my Irish relations completely off the top of my head, the penny dropped.

[GrumpyContractor]

Got roped in to act as an interviewer as client co were short on tehcnical heads.

Were interviewing for a Jnr Data Warehouse Developer position.

First chap to come in was asked "Why do you think you are suitable for the role?" replied with "Worked for DHL for six years so am familiar with Warehouses"


No further questions m'lord!

[Sausage Surprise]

Made it too the lift when escort (IBM) asked "Come far?", "Newcastle" I replied, "Oh!", interview over. Bloody agents.

Were you in Sunderland?

[GrumpyContractor]

Not sure if this counts:

Had a call from an agency who is rather unpopular on here, let’s call them C. Futures...no that’s far too obvious, Computer.F is more anonymous...

Attempted to convince me to apply for a role that was really good, a fantastic opportunity apart from being completely irrelevant with reference to my area of expertise in every conceivable way.

I politely declined.

A week goes by and I get a call from a local number

“Good morning, may I speak to Mr. Contractor?”

“This is he”

“This is A.N.Other head of development from Client Co, we were expecting you for an interview over an hour ago, is everything okay?”

“Er what? Who? News to me! I think you better have a word with your agent”

This happened over a 18 months ago, I’ve since been informed the Client Co had similar experiences from the agency and have since ceased using them.

[FGB]

Were you in Sunderland?

That's fighting talk!

Heathrow actually.

[MyUserName]

I was not in the interview but a colleague interviewed a contractor. We needed them to setup the COM interfaces for our API. His cv was odd in that it did not mention COM. We phoned the agent who assured us he was a COM expert. Interview starts:

Interviewer: "Have you actually used COM?"
Contractor:"No"

End of interview.

Apparently, he was a coms engineer.

[jmo21]

I was not in the interview but a colleague interviewed a contractor. We needed them to setup the COM interfaces for our API. His cv was odd in that it did not mention COM. We phoned the agent who assured us he was a COM expert. Interview starts:

Interviewer: "Have you actually used COM?"
Contractor:"No"

End of interview.

Apparently, he was a coms engineer.

Surely this would be obvious from a CV?

[MojoDog]

Surely this would be obvious from a CV?

I thought that...

[MyUserName]

Surely this would be obvious from a CV?

I did not see the cv much but from what I understand the agent assured us he was a COM expert, we read his cv and phoned the agent to say that he clearly was not and the agent convinced us otherwise. I am not sure how but I do know it was our guy's first time interviewing anyone or dealing with agents from that side of the fence.

I have had similar experiences:

At university I had an interview and was asked what stats modules I did and I replied none. There was an awkward silence until they asked if I realised the job I was being interviewed for was a statstician. I was told it was for a computer programmer.

At Bloomberg I got to 11 out of 12 interviews before being rejected as it was a Unix position and I had never used Unix.

In Basingstoke I was interviewed and after an hour or they told me I was not a good fit as they needed someone with strong C# and ASP. Neither of which are on my cv.