It’s Not Just Applicants That Can Fail Job Interviews

I have plenty of stories about job interviewers not reading the “handbook” about job interviews, but this one still annoys me even years later. It’s all well and good for experts to throw advice at job candidates regarding how to prepare, act, and even dress for interviews, but if the other side of the equation doesn’t follow the same standards or procedures, then they are wasting your time — and potentially missing out on good staff, too.

The company I worked for at the time was going to be shut down. This left me looking for a new job, and my particular engineering specialty rather limited the range of companies that might employ me. I was invited for an interview with [Company]. It was about 200 miles from where I was living at the time, but it was also a major player in my industry. The interview was scheduled for first thing in the morning, so I drove there the day before, spent the night in a B&B, and then attended the interview the next day.

The interview itself was pretty straightforward. I’d had plenty of interviews before then (even more since), and this one was plain vanilla. They explained how the job was a field support engineering role that included a rolling call-out system where one week in four I would be on-call twenty-four-seven. This was not quite what I was looking for and made me a little uncertain, but I needed a job and couldn’t be too fussy. Then, something happened to push me right over to “You can stick your job where the sun don’t shine” territory.

Most of the interview panel was smartly dressed in shirts and ties, and I personally was wearing a business suit, but there was this one guy in a T-shirt and jeans with a mop of unkempt hair. He didn’t say much for most of the interview; he just slouched there in his chair looking bored. I don’t quite remember what his role was — senior engineer, I think — but he looked and sounded like a stereotypical nerd, and I say that as a professional nerd myself. Unfortunately, he also had a certain attitude, like having to be involved with something as pedestrian as a job interview was somehow beneath him and a waste of his intellect.

In my CV (aka resume), I naturally include the various training courses I had attended and certificates I had achieved, and a couple of those dealt with mobile phone technologies. I hadn’t worked in that area for some years, and this company didn’t use mobile phone technology at all anyway, so I had not revised that particular topic, focusing instead on the technologies that they did use and manufacture. My belief is that including all the things I had done over the years demonstrated a well-rounded experience and how I had been able to adapt and learn new subjects beyond my original degree as required.

We were nearing the end of the interview when this scruffy-looking guy asked a really obscure question about mobile phone tech. I couldn’t remember what the answer was and honestly said so, pointing out that I hadn’t revised that particular subject as it wasn’t relevant to the job spec they had supplied. He responded that I shouldn’t have even put it in my CV if I didn’t expect to be quizzed on the topic, leaning back in his chair with a smug look on his face. Any doubt that I might have had suddenly evaporated, and I knew that I really didn’t want to work in this place.

Now, this guy has no idea how much time and effort I spent working in that area of engineering or how I attained that qualification. As far as I am concerned, I fully earned the right to put that entry onto my CV, and if he wanted to be a complete smart-a**e coming up with a question just to trip me up, then that said far more about him than me.

It also occurred to me that if it had gotten the job, then this clown would probably have been my immediate supervisor. Oh, joy.

With hindsight, I should have given them feedback there and then that if this was the best example of their management and how they treated staff, then they were not really selling the job. But when you’re young and frankly desperate for work, you don’t want to get on the wrong side of anyone.