Recent Tales from the Interview

Job interview stories.

Oct 2008

Persistence is Key and The Nightmare Dream Job

by in Tales from the Interview on

Persistence is Key

After two years, Thomas B. had become somewhat bored with his job. He was the first developer the small TV station had ever hired, and while he enjoyed building a PHP-based CMS that they'd use internally, over time his job had essentially been reduced to babysitting the web site. He accepted another offer and told his boss about his plans to leave.

Since the CMS had been built from the ground up and Thomas was the only one who knew everything about the system, he was an integral part of the interviewing and hiring process. His boss delivered him six résumés and told him that all six of those candidates would be in that day. Thomas hadn't been given much time to review the résumés, so he just had an opportunity to skim them before the first candidate arrived.

124 comments - Last comment @ 2021-08-07

The Receptionist Test

by in Tales from the Interview on

"When you work in computing services for a university, you spend about as much time on high-minded development as you do un-jamming printers and resetting passwords for faculty," Ed G. writes. "It's not ideal, but it's a living." It was time to get some new staff, and after being burned by some previous employees that could talk the talk, but not walk the walk, they devised a new litmus test for potential hires, called "The Receptionist Test."

It's quite simple, really. When an applicant arrives for an interview, (s)he spends at least five minutes waiting in reception. During this time, the receptionist stages a minor tech support problem and asks for the applicant's help.

265 comments - Last comment @ 2017-08-05

Routers, Routers, Everywhere

by in Tales from the Interview on

CommQuack hires like crazy. They hire in good times, they hire in bad times. They hire before, during, and after periods of massive layouts. Only one department was sheltered from the endless churn of hirings and layoffs — HR. For a company of ten thousand people, the fact that one thousand of them worked in HR should tell you something.

And the HR staff was busy. Résumés came in by the hundreds, and those that weren't referrals from existing employees were fiercely fought over so that the first person to grab it could claim the bounty. The HR staff were paid near-minimum wage rates, and like time-share salesmen, they were paid primarily on commission. Each referred employee that turned into a hire netted the referrer a cool $5,000.00. The upshot of this is that this meant that if you were qualified but not referred by someone in HR, you didn't get hired. The upshot of this is that a lot of unqualified boobs got hired. After interviews from HR, the candidates would be sent to the departments they hoped to work for, which meant that Grig L. had to conduct many of the interviews.

The Applicants

130 comments - Last comment @ 2012-11-14
Contact Privacy Policy RSS

Copyright © 2025 Inedo Publishing - v2024.9

Monitored by Panopta • Deployed with BuildMaster