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April 30, 2024
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I thought this post was going to end with asking advice or a funny twist but it just...ends.
Cool story.
That's a pretty epic failure. Any plans on beating your old high score?
Eh, don't feel too bad, everyone has bad interviews. That being said, hopefully you've learned from your mistakes.
Also, since I'm not entirely sure what you were trying to achieve with this post (sympathy?), this is now a thread about our really awful interviews.
For SA, I almost fell asleep in an interview once. The room at my school was super hot and stuffy, and the banker spent like legit 10 minutes rambling about something meaningless in response to one of my standard end of interview questions, and I could feel that I was getting irreversibly sleepy. Spent the last couple minutes of that interview hardcore squinting at the guy trying to stay awake. At one point I did the head-droop-immediately-sit-up but the dude was staring out the window while talking so IDK if he noticed. Probably did, Whatever. Either way I got dinged.
Had a buddy get asked what his favorite book was, during PE recruiting. He panicked, couldn't think of anything except the Bible so he made up some stupid ass title like "The Generals of 1875" and said it was about civil war military leaders. The PE guy then asked him "if it's about civil war generals, then why it is set in 1875? The civil war ended in 1865. " Dunno what he said.
One more PE recruiting story from another friend. This wasn't embarrassing at the time in 2012 or so, but is kind of funny in retrospect. He did a quick in-office case study on Yeti and recently told me he made some extremely confident claim about how he's an angler and it's just a fad at best and there's a ZERO percent chance that there's a long term market for $300 coolers... Here we are a few years later and Yeti is the best buyout of the past decade, potentially ever, having returned like 50x. FWIW, I would have agreed with him back in 2012 100%.
Semi relevant: One VP I worked with loved to ask a series of "trap" questions for fun - for example, "Do you follow world events?" (everyone obviously says yes). "OK, can you name 3 heads of nation states other than the US president?" (blank stares from 90% of candidates).
Not sure if this is true but I heard a story once of a candidate in a medical school interview meeting with a guy with a heavy foreign accent. There are some odd interview questions in them, depending on the interviewer...
One guy asked an interviewee "My wife is virgin, what do you think of this?" Candidate started some generic answer like oh well I think it's important we respect everyone's choices in sexuality and living arrangements and religious preferences, and while its really unconventional I'm sure there's a reason behind it, I'm sure it'll work out in the end. Asked the interviewer if his family knew.
Interviewer had a really weird confused look on his face and said "I didn't say she was a virgin, I said she was PERSIAN".
This is gold, needs way more bananas haha
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