I love this song and I find myself humming it or singing it quite often. It expresses to a T the kind of things that we see on a weekly basis in our company. Candidates want to know why they don’t get hired… Just this week we had in our organization:

  • a female candidate use the F bomb in an interview
  • the candidate showed up 20 minutes late for an interview, and never apologized or even acknowledged it
  • a candidate who overwhelmed the client we sent him to with his cologne
  • a candidate immediately sat down at the interview with a notebook, and before the employer could say anything started asking a series of questions like: “How much does this job pay… What are the hours… Can you describe the benefits…and can I work from home?” And when we asked him after the interview where he came up with these questions, he said that he read it in an interviewing book.
  • a candidate who, after seven minutes of waiting, announced to the admin that she was tired of waiting and left the interview
  • a candidate who stood up in the middle of an interview with the hiring authority and stated that he was “overqualified” for the job and walked out
  • the candidate who claims that he just didn’t have time to look on the internet to look up the company and he really knew nothing about them

Now, please remember that not all of our candidates are really this challenged. Our company gets close to 100 people a week an interview. So, when you consider the low ratio of stupid things that people do, these things may not have that much of an impact. But it’s just that these kinds of ridiculous things happen daily and it keeps candidates from getting hired.

Now, before you jump to any conclusions that it’s always the candidate who screws up the interview, let me share with you some of the things that employers did this week in interviewing some of our candidates:

  • One of our illustrious clients asked the candidate, “Just exactly what are you interviewing for?”
  • Another one spent 10 minutes telling the candidate why you would want to work at the company
  • Another hiring authority told one of our candidates that he was the 15th candidate that he and interviewed and that his company really didn’t know what they were looking for
  • One hiring authority asked the candidate how old she was
  • Another hiring authority told the candidate he was just too old to be working in a place like that…that he wouldn’t fit in culturally.
  • Another hiring authority was 45 minutes late for the interview and told the candidate that he (the employer) had “a hard stop in 10 minutes.”

People are crazy!