She waited for around 40 minutes in a shopping centre while the interviewer's co-worker called them "two or three times". When they finally showed up, Tiara says she was told it was because the meeting wasn't in the schedule. She needed work at the time, so took the job when she was offered it, but says she would handle the situation differently now.
"I would not take a job if they took that long," she says, adding that she believed her treatment during the interview was a sign of how the firm tended to treat staff. She is one of many people who spoke to the BBC about their worst job interview experiences after we wrote about the one interview question that leaves you feeling uncomfortable. While those situations can be hard to deal with in the moment, they can also teach us a lot about the world of work.
During an interview for an assistant at a book publisher in New York, Chas Edwards was asked a question he wasn't expecting. "I was asked for my first job if I was a crier," he recalls. Thinking the interviewer was being funny, Chas replied that he didn't cry.
He was later told that this was why he got the job. "Her last assistant had cried – too often, I guess? – and she wanted someone who didn't cry. So she was being serious and I thought it was a joke," he says.
Chas says it was "a terrible, terrible job with a miserable boss" and while he managed to make it through 13 months there without crying he was "crying inside". "I set the world record for working for this person. No-one had ever lasted three months with her before," he recalls.
Despite all this, Chas says he is in some ways grateful the experience was so awful. "Because every job since then, even the bad ones, are not that bad," he says, adding that he can "cry anywhere now". Corinne Card also found herself floored when the first question she was asked in an interview for an administrative job was if she liked working with people.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
