30 HR Recruiters Share The Worst Interview Experiences They’ve Ever Had

Not normally something an HR director should say....

Now, I cannot take that image out of my mind 😬🥴

You just had a weirdly lax reception job. I was always busy to the point of swamped and had to retrieve tons of information for my employer. Stan would have sucked at the reception job i had. 🤣

I think MichaelJohnson wants to be a receptionist

TBF, this was a fresh college graduate in Criminal Justice interviewing for a IT manager job though.

Yes. Hearing about the tears in his eyes brought tears to my eyes.

Such a compassionate response from OP and their team!

A sentence might be too short. Maybe a.whole paragraph.

Not necessarily. Sometimes there is just a few cents or dollars missing because of a mistype or miscount of change. It is good to know how a company acts about 23 missing cents, but it's not the right question to bring to an interview

That depends on the amount. I was "missing" $500 when I was a bank teller & was fired immediately. The next day, I get a call back saying they forgot to give me the $500 dollars in quarters I had requested & given them the cash for, and said I wasn't fired & could come back in the next day. I quit about 2 weeks later.

Nah, what if it was only a $20. Ya know, for a pack of ciggies and a gallon of gas… 😂

Really? I would never have guessed

Not in a casino cage. I used to work in one and money missing mean surveillance would watch 8 hours of you working to see where it went. And you might get suspended. But unless they caught you actually stealing money they didn't notify gaming or Metro Police.

Employers don't need to know if you're on welfare benefits, and it's better not to mention it. You can just say you're only available for part time work. However, you are expected to take on full time when the opportunity strikes. You can ask about healthcare benefits though.

The actual store manager knew I didn't take it, but it was a franchise and it was company policy to let people gonif a certain amount went missing.

I was thinking this might be why she was asking. She may have been accused elsewhere (bc prejudice towards low income people is real) and be scared. It may be poor social skills that made her ask this question, but not necessarily dishonesty

No, it’s a case of “this job won’t pay my rent and I need a roof over my head so these are my limitations.” You can work a certain amount of hours at minimum wage and still keep your benefits. Honestly, when you’re stuck in the system like that, job opportunities for more than minimum wage are hard to come by because of other factors, and you don’t get a time limit on when you lose your benefits so you can save up money. Once you start working, even an hour or .50 cents more than income guidelines state, you lose your benefits immediately. If you wait too long to tell them, you have to pay whatever money you received from public assistance back…. Even if you only earned just over the limit. It’s really hard to break out of the system on your own. Her comment about the cash missing was a huge 🚩

Can work, but not an idiot and knows she will have less income overall if she works more than a certain number of hours a week.

Doubtful. Many single mothers have an impossible choice- stay home yo watch their kids and barely scrape by (or not) on meager benefits , or go to work (often at whatever job will take them) and have to find someone to watch their kids, which usually costs more per hour than they are being paid. In order to qualify for benefits (like childcare, which, convince me harms anyone), these mothers MUST work and show pay stubs- but how the heck do they get a job if they have no childcare? It's a horrendous chicken and the egg situation. And before you make assumptions about family- many of these women don't have familiar support or people who can lend them money. Generational cycles of poverty are incredibly real and self-perpetuate. Of course having kids makes it doubly impossible but, I'm guessing since you are sharing anti-wepfare sentiment you might also be anti-choice. When a woman is forced by the government to birth children she cannot support, why shouldn't the government help provide until the mother is in a position to? The system should allow people on support to stabilize themselves and accumulate enough financial security to sepf-support before withdrawing benefits. Otherwise, it's pointless and keeps them in poverty. As soon as they make a wildly small amount of money, benefits are withdrawn, like food, childcare, etc. If anything it's the welfare system sabotaging people

More of a can work but can't afford to lose welfare with what they were offering for the position. At least when I was in that boat that's how it was

Sadly, sometimes you can make more on welfare than at a full time job. It's a messed up system all the way.

Sometimes these sound like people purposely tanking an interview. Maybe they’re lazy or deluded. But maybe, just maybe, their parents set it up because it’s what they want their kid to do, but the kid doesn’t and wants to work in the field of their choice, not their parents’ choice. You never know.

This goes in the other direction straight into delusion.

A programmer or coder would more likely think of it as a coding problem to be solved. Thinking they may need more than just 2 groupings, especially as a large % of the population agree that someone can be neither, for example. That's why they got excited. But just being so free to say that personal ideal to a group of strangers, busted their bubble.

Well, it help weed out this nutcase, so it came in handy.

I thought so at first too, then I realized gender would have to be explicitly given as part of the data. It would only be weird if they expected you to guess someone's gender based on other information.

It's a simple algorithm test. Given a dataset, can you write a groupBy that is efficient? It could have been by anything, hair color for example

Grouping by gender isn't a weird question. Maybe they wanted him to point out the missing options or just work with the existing data.

Contextually it really isn't. There's a lot of programmatic freedom in that question in terms of how you could approach it and it gives them a good sense of your experience and your thought process.

No its not. Gender is an important data point recorded for all manner of things.

Picking a random grouping of things and sort them by some quality is a common interview question for programming positions. I've had this, given some list of clients sort them by name and reverse a string without using built in methods

It'S more of a skill test, really

What if getGender has no value?