Hiring good employees can be downright painful. Not only do you scour stacks of resumes, you hope their skills align with the position. And to boot, you pray that listed experience is the truth!
Know you are not alone! Check out these examples from hiring managers who understand your special kind of torture.
14. The truth shall set you free, or at least get you to advance
Having interviewed quite a few candidates I’ve come to accept that many many people will try to BS their way through something they have a dabbling knowledge in. That’s alright. When I ask a direct question and the person is trying to work it out on the fly to come up with an answer that sounds correct I get some great insight into their troubleshooting abilities. This only works if you know what it is you are talking about though.
If you’ve never heard of ansible, please don’t try to tell me what a great database application it is.
At the end of the day though, my favorite answer and the one most likely to get a candidate with limited experience on to the next phase is to just admit you don’t know, but that you’ll look it up/google it and be able to answer the question next time. Most recent candidate we hired did just that. I passed the question I’d asked them onto the next person to have time to do the interview and they were asked again. They must have had the right answer this time because I’m training them now.
13. Dress for the occasion
Well, I was testing a potential welder once.
He showed up in shorts, muscle shirt, and flip flops… To do a weld test. And interview. I turned him away citing safety concerns about his wardrobe, and never rescheduled. Figured he was too dumb for me to deal with.
12. Testing the resume
I speak enough gringo Spanish to get by, and back in the day when I was a hiring manager, if anybody put “fluent in Spanish” on their resume, I’d walk into the interview room and introduce myself and start the interview in Spanish.
The looks of panic from the kids who’d taken, like, three years of high school Spanish before college were priceless.
11. Smart candidate, epic fail
When you’re doing a video interview and you can watch them try to google stuff in the reflection of their glasses.
Small props for being clever though, he was paraphrasing the question back to me as a way to use the voice assistant.
10. Fake it ’til you break it
As someone who has hired many technicians in IT positions, I’m amazed at how many people would fake highly technical knowledge.
I remember I needed a telecom engineer with very specific knowledge of a very specific voice system. I was getting suspicious of this one candidate so I started asking about the exact syntax of command lines and this guy was actually throwing out made up commands! I was both fascinated and annoyed.
9. “PIVOT!”
We had an interview candidate who said their Excel skills were “9.5 out of 10” and they knew how to do Pivot tables.
They literally started crying when we brought out a laptop for the skills test and asked them to make a pivot table out of sample data.
8. Maury Povich would “call” her a liar
We had someone come in and interview for a call center position. Their resume claimed they had 3 years working in a call center in town.
When she arrived, she was very lethargic, and couldn’t answer basic interview questions. When asked what she did at Call Center A, she literally just said “call center rep.” When asked to elaborate on her duties, she repeated the same thing. No details were given. She even claimed that she has never been asked such hard and detailed questions during a job interview before. We didn’t make it past 3 very basic questions.
We have concluded she lied about working at Call Center A, or at least she certainly didn’t work anywhere near 3 years there.
7. Over inflated job titles
A common one I see a lot is work history that is grandiose and excessively overqualified, especially if it’s difficult or impossible to verify.
I am in a high immigration city and deal with lots of international candidates, and have met a vast amount of people with titles like “Executive Director of Worldwide Distribution” or “Senior Vice President of Global Operations” from a company in Bulgaria or Cambodia or Dubai with no phone number or English website. The position descriptors and skills on these resumes usually look copy and pasted from a template, and additionally, these people often claim master or doctorate level educations that are equally difficult to verify.
I have had more than one “CFO” interview for an entry level position who had never seen a Profit & Loss statement before.
6. Be real. Don’t embellish.
I don’t see a lot of things people are totally making up, but it’s easy to spot when they are heavily embellishing work history.
It’s totally fine to have worked in a restaurant or retail store, I’m hiring for entry level professional positions so you expect that kind of work history.
I’ll take your app a lot more seriously if you focus on the customer service aspect of the job and don’t try to make it sound like you, the cashier, were running the place.
5. Not sure I’d work for him
At a job fair I told people that we were doing a lot of work in the programming language Balrave, and asked if they had any experience with it.
A disappointingly high number talked about using it for classes in college, and writing some side programs in it after they heard about it, and so on.
They must have felt silly later when they Googled it and discovered that there is no programming language Balrave, I’d just made it up as a way to tell who was lying to me.
4. Huge red flag
I had a woman once that had around 10 jobs over the last 2.5 years-she claimed to have a ‘wealth of knowledge’ from all of these different ‘opportunities to learn’.
She talked around most questions, and long story short, I found out that she and a friend would apply at companies as minorities, and then quit and sue for discrimination.
She had sued 8 of the 10.
Bullet dodged.
3. Hire the bad interviewers…maybe
Telltale signs that the candidate is making stuff up makes for great stories, but it isn’t what bothers me.
What bothers me is that (I am convinced that) there are people that are great interviewers and poor interviewers. My boss hired a great interviewer, months later we escorted him out of the building because he was beyond worthless. I wish I knew how many rock stars I/we passed on because they sucked at interviewing.
2. Glad she’s not a software pirate
I once asked to a supposedly experienced front-end developer “can you code valid HTML?”
Her reply was more than enough: “yes, all my software is legal.”
1. A Gordon Ramsay ego can only leave you unemployed
I’ve been running kitchens for a long time, and anytime i get an interview who’s talking like Gordon Ramsey or postulating about how good they are and how inspired by Michelin starred chefs they are, it’s a massive red flag that this idiot’s cooking experience has been 90% youtube videos, 8% home cooking and 2% standing around looking at his phone on the line.
Are you cringing right now? Me too!
Tell us how you relate by sharing in the comments or tell us your own hiring nightmare.
