Interviews

A big part of my job is recruiting and interviewing people for various jobs at my company. I really love what I do. I love working in human resources. I love calling people and offering them jobs. The best part is when they get all excited and scream and jump up and down while on the phone...its happened more than once, and it makes my job really fun. The unfortunate thing, is that in order to find that one special employee, I have to interview several other people that may be "special" in other ways. It eats up a lot of my time and can be really boring. This week alone, I have been in interviews for almost two full days, asking the same questions and hearing a lot of the same responses, over and over. It gets hard to focus and pay attention and not yawn while the candidates are talking. Nothing puts an interviewee at ease like the interviewer yawning, right? Sometimes, the candidates are so weird and random that the interviews are downright bizarre. Let's see if I can put together a list of the most memorable interviews.

One guy interviewing for a night-shift custodian position kept making jokes about drinking & sleeping on the job.

One older guy interviewed for a research assistant job because he wanted to go back to school for free and get his Masters. He was very open about it. But when I asked him questions about his work experience, he started talking about his knowledge of helicopters and actually drew diagrams of different types of helicopters on the white board. I wish I was joking.

One guy started name-dropping all the city councilmen that he knew and told me which ones were nice and which ones were jerks.

I get this one a lot...when I ask about their work experience relevant to whatever job they are applying for (accounting, IT, etc), I get detailed definitions of the industry terminology/processes. Like, a general ledger account is blah, blah, blah....and you have to document expenses and income. Really? I had no idea that accounting involved keeping track of the money coming in and going out. Thanks for sharing!

One guy asked about what our company's background checks involved, because he got out of prison on drug charges about a year ago, and he just wanted to be upfront about it, even though his application said he had never been convicted of a felony.

Lots of people ask about how many vacation & sick days they get...and how quickly they can start using them, and how frequently. I even had someone ask me if he could be considered for a leave of absence. Dude, you're not even hired yet! You have to pace yourself. Save this question for your first day of work, sheesh.

One woman sent me a thank you email after her interview and included a link to her personal blog. I went to check it out and it had a warning about explicit adult content and langugage. Mostly it was a bunch of her poetry, but it was definitely adult. Why would you send me a link to you talking about your hoo-ha and about your sexual explorations? #1 - I don't even like poetry. #2 - we don't know each other well enough to discuss that kind of thing. #3 - do you really think I want to read about that, hire you, and then have to work with you every day? I will only be picturing a big vagina where your face should be, every time I look at you.