Please tell me about your embarrassing job interviews

[Itdoesntrain]

I've been made redundant and applied for a few jobs. I had 5 booked in (different jobs at different companies!) but 2 were cancelled due to the mini budget announcements so am feeling sorry for myself

Anyway, last minute interview arranged at 9am today for 10am today on Zoom.

It was a complete and utter disaster. I had such good answers in my head but just ended up tripping over all my words and stuttering. I couldn't even think of a decent question to ask at the end.

I even started getting teary eyed when they asked why I left my old job (redundancy!) - but I didn't actually cry. I know they noticed my watery eyes though...

I KNOW I haven't got the job, but I'm feeling so cringe about it all and keep having flashbacks 🤣

Please cheer me up with your embarrassing interviews. Extra points if you cried in your interview!

Oh my GOD! I got the job.

I was so shocked and stunned that when she phoned me just now, I sounded so ungrateful 😆😆😆

DH spent the whole evening telling me why the job would be crap and to make me feel better 🤣

Well done! You must have been confident and professional on the outside despite your qualms

Also medical school interview as an international student.
Interviewer: So once you finish your degree do you plan to stay in (name of country)?
Me: Oh no I'm foot loose and fancy free 🤦🏼‍♀️

CONGRATULATIONS! 🍾

Well done OP!

Your love DH, bless him!

Amazing! Well done! I've just skipped to the end and was hoping you'd say you'd got the job!

I've been having this too!

Excellent news OP. Congratulations!

Well done!!!!

Oh god, so many when I think. The job for the Environment Agency where I forgot what a floodplain was.

The one where, when they asked where I saw myself in 5 years time, I waffled on about being part-time and maybe having an allotment.

The one where I just couldn't think of an answer to a problem scenario, so basically just passed on that q after really awkward silence. I was pleased with how I recovered and was ok in the rest of the interview. But knew I'd messed up deep down. I've been there 20 years now.

Not a job but medical school interview at Newcastle. I'm coeliac and the hotel I was staying in had glutened me at breakfast, so I was feeling awful. Then managed to skid across the icy carpark and crash my car into a bollard on the way in. Most of the interview was an awful blur of me talking nonsense, but I do vividly remember them asking the one and only guaranteed question of 'why do you want to be a doctor?' and just gaping at them like a fish, because all I could think about was how ill I felt and how much the bloody car was going to cost to fix. I asked them to repeat the question, and then finally said I DIDN'T KNOW, but it had seemed like a good idea at the time I applied😱. Heard this coming out of my mouth with absolute horror, tried frantically to think of a way to salvage it/ pass it off as a joke, and couldn't. So just stopped talking and let it sit while they all stared at me. This was
nearly ten years ago, I qualified (from a different medical school, obviously 😂) three years ago, and still go hot and cold thinking about that interview.

I had one for a job I was doing on secondment over zoom. My daughter 5 was ill at home that day. Prior to interview I gave her loads of snacks and told her mummy was busy. Literally the minute the interview started she appeared at the door. I ushered her back into the don't room and told her how important it was to be quiet for a bit. I restarted my interview and she brought me a tin of soup and insisted she needed it right then. Thankfully my interviewers understood and gave me some time to sort her out (ring my husband and insist he came home) before rejoining. Worst start to an interview ever.o

Congratulations on getting the job OP.

Not an interview but I wasn't paying attention to a webinar that I had contributed a couple of comments earlier on. Suddenly heard "Billybob, would you be interested in this". Slightly embarrassed at having been caught not paying attention... Said "Er, yes, that's great".

20 minutes later recieved an invite to a meeting with an active MP and absolutely no idea what I'm supposed to have been doing. Oops!!!!

I've just had my 2nd interview at 52, last one was at 17. Mind went blank many times then I got a tad emotional and had to be given a tissue. Don't expect to get the job sadly.

Job interview as a Financial Director...

The night before, I slipped on wet decking and landed heavily on the back of my head. Took what I thought were paracetamol very early the next morning.

Interview at 9am, ended up talking nonsense about incoming 'cash'. Just kept wittering on about 'cash' and how 'cash' was pretty cool.

Then threw up in their waste paper bin.

Turned out I was heavily concussed, had taken tramadol and was completely off my tits.

They called me an ambulance and rather surprisingly, didn't offer me the job.

I had a great interview until I went to leave and instead of saying ‘lovely to meet you’ (to my potential future manager and in earshot of the CEO) I just said ‘love you’. I was mortified! Luckily we all laughed it off and I got the job!

Brilliant! This made me lol 😂

My daughter had that experience recently. She said the warmness between the candidate/principal etc made it obvious that this was the predetermined successful applicant, and that she and any others were just 'making up the numbers. Moreover, the principal was very rude, refused to pay (considerable, involving a flight!) travel expenses and wouldn't provide any feedback. I told her she had dodged a bullet. She's now happily settled in a way more suitable post.

My worst experience - I was in let's just say a difficult place career-wise. My expertise was HR but I applied for an equal opps post, just because. When I rocked up for my interview and realised that one of the interviewers was a manager from a different sector whom I had already worked with, and another was from my CIPD course... I lost the will to live. Couldn't answer any of the questions, so said there was no point in wasting theirs or my time any more. I cried all the way home!!!

Congratulations OP!

My worst was them, not me - panel of five sitting there with faces like thunder, me alone in the middle of the room. At the end I asked what they liked about working there, and received a range of terse, non-committal answers that told me all I needed to know. I am a cheerful, can-do person but working with this bunch would have been miserable, so I wasn't upset when I never heard back from them despite travelling a long way and paying for overnight accommodation. Grim.

Also, not an interview but my first day in a contract job. Somewhat embarrassingly I had applied for the permanent position, not got it due to "lack of experience" but then got placed there by an agency until the permanent person started, and then had to train him up. Anyway, I was hanging out of my arse after a night on the wine with a friend I'd not seen for ages. Wore a brand new pair of kitten heels and as I walked across the wooden floor, I somehow lost my footing, skidded along the floor and flailed around on my back like an upended tortoise until the lovely receptionist rescued me. For shame.

I had a skype interview, pre-covid. We used skype a lot on our laptop to talk to our daughters at uni. I did this interview on the PC - checked in advance that skype was installed and working, etc. When it came to the interview I couldn't get the sound working. Skype listed about 10 possible microphones, and I tried a couple with no results. We had to call it off and reschedule, and checking later, skype listed numerous sound sources that didn't actualy exist!

I work in tech, oops.

I had one interview where I was given a document in a tiny font with dodgy formatting... I couldn't really read it and the bits that I could read, I couldn't make any sense of. Rather than ask for a larger version of it, I pretended to read it and answered every question about it with some variation of 'I don't know'. They rephrased and gave me hints several times and I rigidly stuck to not knowing anything.

Another last week that I thought had gone ok, not great but not awful. In the rejection call, the interviewer said 'If you are actually even interested in this role...' three times so the hours of prep that I did obviously came across well.

I had previous experience in technology A, and went for a job with the manufacturer of technology B, which was in the same market space.

I researched and revised for days about technology B, assuming they would ask me questions about their own stuff.

But no, they wanted to know if I really did have experience with technology A, which I hadn't touched in a year or so, and asked me questions about that instead.

As soon as they started grilling me, I realised this was perfectly logical from their perspective and I had made a schoolboy error, revising the wrong thing.

I struggled so much to answer their questions, they stopped the interview and suggested we didn't waste each others time.

I realised how it looked and was so mortified I agreed, and couldn't get out of there fast enough.

Looking back it was the wrong job for me anyway, and my career has been great. But at the time I felt like the world's biggest idiot and a fraud to boot.

Congratulations @Itdoesntr🥂 That's great news!

I went to a job interview and ended up getting interviewed by Rochelle Humes. She was being really weird and horrible to me. Turns out I was being pranked and secretly filmed on a tv show.... literally thought it was a real job interview! This was about 9 years ago now 😭🫠

Had two interviews two days apart, told the recruiter of over the first was mine, great for, told the other one no idea why they even interviewed me, such an awful fit, anyway that’s the one that offered me and in had 4 very happy years there then went into bigger things.