30 Job Interview Stories That Range From Hilarious To Totally Unhinged

I had an interview for an engineering position. The lady grilled me about completely unrelated stuff and I finally had it when she said “sell me this pen”. I was like “I’m not a sales person I’m an engineer” and she flipped out and said I’m unqualified and bad at dealing with stressful situations and I calmly said “well I’m dealing with you right now”. She was not amused but her co interviewer was trying not to laugh. The workers in the back looked miserable and I had already decided I didn’t want to work for her at that point.

Not me but a friend was applying for a Christmas temp job and the last question was "Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?" Her reply was "No. It's a Christmas classic".

She got the job obviously.

He asked me all the “wrong” questions.

are you in a serious relationship? do you want kids? are you religious? how do you lean politically?

then told me all about the problems with his marriage and why they’re in couples counseling. says jesus was their saving grace. he kept pushing that i would change my mind on kids once my “biological clock” kicked in. he admitted he was reluctant to hire women because they usually put work second to their families. then also stated he wanted to hire a women to help keep the office neat and tidy.

and last, but not least..

he gave me an offer for an “administrative assistant” role. i applied for a civil engineering position.

I was interviewing at a company and they asked where I saw myself in 5 years. I have an answer about moving up in position to maybe manage a small team. They said that's not at all what they're looking for, they want someone in that position for 10 years, so I knew I wasn't a good fit, so I had fun in the rest of my interview with them. The hr person asked how I was comparing companies, I told her at Capital one they had a small tree house, at epic systems they had a huge treehouse. I looked at her very seriously and asked how big their tree house was, you've never seen an adult so sad to say they don't have a tree house.

Was interviewing to the local wine shop-bar as a Marketing Manager. After 2 rounds of interview, they told me that I will receive a questionnaire about my personality for them to learn more about me.

I thought ok.

They sent a 300 questions clinical psychology test. It had questions about relationship with my parents, my fears or trauma. I was really weirded out and refused to proceed as I don’t want a potential employer to have a record of my psychological issues.

I’d put a company CEO down as a personal reference. I’d worked for him a few years earlier before he took the role, and he’d said if I ever needed him as a reference to put his name down.

One of the department heads came in halfway through the interview, he seemed okay and then he read through my resume…

After that he was really stand-off ish and I didn’t know why. He cut the interview short, goes “[CEO] is a close personal friend and I know for a fact he doesn’t give personal references. We will have to verify this information and we don’t accept candidates who lie on their applications.”

And I was promptly seen to the door, told “don’t call us, we’ll call you” and escorted out of the building.

I got outside, gave [CEO] a call on his mobile, and asked him what gives. I told him what happened, he calls the guy a f*****t, we chat for a bit, and I go about my life.

A few days later I get a call from the weirdo’s recruiting person telling me my references had checked out, they were really keen on hiring me, and asking when I could start.

In the meantime, I’d already interviewed somewhere else and been offered a job on the spot.

I was like… nah, thanks but no thanks.

I had an interviewer who told me they almost didn't invite me in because I had a typo on my resume. When I asked him to point it out he said it was my name... (Slightly odd spelling of a common name).

I was asked to come up with changes for the production process while the interviewer vehemently refused to provide any details about the clients, machines, current processes and products. We spent half an hour of me providing vague explanations to cover as many bases as possible, the interviewer asking to be more specific, me asking for details to be more specific rather than generalizing, the interviewer arguing that providing any informations would make it too easy and me getting back to the first step until the cycle repeated. 

It was truly the most bizarre interview that I have ever had. When he asked to be more specific for the fourth time and still refused to provide any details, I had enough and ended it.

“If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?”

I was interviewing for an analyst position so I went for a “decision tree” Got the job

I once had an interview for a company which it turns out, was behind charging prisoners families the collect call money when the prisoner called them.

They had a laptop where I was supposed to take a proficiency with Linux test. This was an interview at 7 am btw. My first red flag. I was greeted by a password protected root prompt and not given the password. Iknew the commands by heart to drop to single user via editing the grub prompt and bypass the password protection since I worked in a data center and spent a lot of time doing it. Their faces fell. They were actually disappointed they didn't get to treat me like I was stupid for not being able to pass their little test. I completed the rest of the technical questions from a command prompt with no net access and all manpages removed (but not the info pages, real geniuses these guys) and then I surprised them by asking about the work environment. Which consisted of the CEO sitting where he could see everyone's screens and micro managing every thing that was done. A relatively huge for the time database where they made changes on the live DB because the CEO was too cheap to have a testing environment. Ragged out chairs that were stained, and single underpowered dell system attached to the cheapest monitor they could get. The vibe from everyone except the eric trump clone interviewing me was one of misery.

I needed work badly and I was crushed in a way when I was rejected, but in the end I know I really dodged a bullet. The cherry on top was the way they mentioned being a christian company every 30 seconds. What's more christlike than bullying applicants, robbing the families of criminals coincidentally among the most impoverished, and worshiping wealth for yourself?

But he the owner/ceo was rich so I guess a prosperity gospel church would give him a big ol thumbs up? It's been 25 years and I still think of that place occasionally and shudder.

Interviewed for a job at Sears. The guy kept me waiting for 45 minutes while he went to get McDonalds. I saw him leave and come back with his food. During the interview he insulted me talking about my “poor employment history” because I only worked over the summers during college and called me fat. As he was finishing up being a d******d to me he paused to lick a spot of ketchup off his shirt. It’s not surprising that Sears went bankrupt if this was kind of guy they had in charge of job interviews.

I slept through an interview, completely forgetting about it. In my defense it was sort of sick. Only realized when I was looking at my calendar that evening. I sent an apology email the next business day.

I ended up getting the job.

Not a question but when I tried to get a job that would involve a fair amount of driving, I half jokingly wrote down 'drivers license' under work experience. My interviewer took one look at the application and said "valid drivers license, good. You're already ahead of the other guy".

A potential employer scheduled an interview with my brother... without telling him.

They were upset when he didn't show up, even after he explained the situation. "The best they could do" was to reschedule it for later that day. They did not understand why he was unwilling to immediately drop everything and get on a last-second flight across the country to attend.

He politely asked that they not contact him again.

While at college I interviewed for a job in a sportswear shop. 


They asked me 'what is your biggest weakness?'


For some reason I replied, 'sausage rolls!'.


I didn't get the job!

I was desperately looking for a job, anything. So I applied at the dollar store. This is the conversation I had when they called me back:

Them: Hello is this [my name]?

Me: yes

Them: good you’re hired

Me: ok who is this

Them: the dollar store. Bring your direct deposit form. Okay bye

Me: wait!!! What location is it? When do I come in? Who am I speaking to?

Them: [location]. Come on Friday.
*they hang up*

I ended up getting a better job the next day so I never did show up in Friday lol
*Edit: formatting.

A lawyer telling me they forged their clients signature to make sure the documents were filed on time. The client didn’t care.

Or the other lawyer who told me they paid a bribe to get documents filed on time.

Who says that in an interview?

"If you were a brick in a wall which one would you be?"

I'm sorry, I didn't know I was interviewing with Pink Floyd.

The interviewer complimented me on something on my resume and I got excited and flustered, went to push my glasses up and stuck my finger right up my nose instead.

My dad was at an interview at a mall when a brawl broke out. People were throwing chairs and pulling guns. There was blood everywhere. My dad thought it would look impressive to the interviewer if he tried to intervene. Spoiler alert, he stood no chance and it did not impress anyone. But he was on tv for it!