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Recruitment. Seriously.

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I am an HR professional. Not a badge many wear with pride, but I do. I know what my function does at its best, and I’m good at it.

I’m doing some contracting work right now because of life circumstances. Sharon and I move to Oz next year, to a…remote location. I am therefore in the process of looking for work with companies that support remote working*

I applied for a role recently where they had one of those cutesie online application forms. One of their questions was “What makes you unique?”

Now, I’m not good with questions like that. I am reasonably smart, and in the right situation, nimble on my intellectual feet and quick witted. In these situations, I flounder.
So, knowing I had nothing to lose, and because my interview chances were slim anyway, I nonchalantly just entered “apart from my mitochondrial DNA?”

Reader, I have an interview. And part of me (only a small part) wonders if I want to work with a firm who likes my degree of snark without having met me!

So:
What’s your funniest recruitment story?

*If anyone knows anyone who would hire a shit hot HR Business Partner with USA, EMEA and APAC experience and would support remote working, let me know!

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Comments

  1. I went for an interview & the HR lady on the interview panel asked me to name one of my strengths. I told her that I was totally honest & a blunt speaker.

    She said to me that she didn’t think that they could be described as strengths & I said
    “ I couldn’t give a fuck what you think fatty”.

    I’ll get my coat…

    • I went for an interview and had to say that my greatest strength was hindsight.
      ‘Hindsight? I don’t really think that’s much of a strength.’
      ‘Well I know that now.’

    • A woman I worked with, when asked what her greatest weakness was, said, ‘Mayonnaise.’ She got the job.

      I once turned up for an interview to find the guy watching a small black-and-white tv at his desk. He slid a bottle of whisky my way and said, ‘Got to watch Boycott getting his hundredth century. Have a drink.’

      As you might expect, that took some time. I was completely pissed by the time the interview started, aaand…got the job.

  2. I know I have shared this before but it was on a reality show with real job interviews.

    “What superpower would you like to possess?”
    “Ooh…erm…Russia?”

    The interviewers burst out laughing and after a small pause, so did the interviewee – it was his genuine answer but he realised he’d accidentally made a great gag. He got the job too,

  3. I started at a new job and everyone seemed to be cricket fans; one of my co workers was a Pakistani on the fringe of their national squad and it became apparent that he wouldn’t be doing much, his Sunday batting performance though was crucial!
    It was on my CV, that I liked cricket.

  4. I was interviewed for an electroincs role in a team designing fancy mp3 players (anybody remember the Rio Diamond?). Obviously, part of testing such a thing is listening, so it helps a lot if you like music.

    I turned up at 9am. The chap interviewing me was wearing a PWEI t-shirt. “I saw them at my fresher’s week” I said. Four hours of talking about music later, he said “I take it you can do the job, but I have to ask you some questions”. Whereupon I had a 10-question Pop Quiz. I scored 9 out of 10.

    I got the job and spent the next seven years like a kid in a sweet shop.

    So, it’s often about the “other interests” bit of your CV.

    • While having a very particular set of skills is important for both CV box-ticking and going on violent revenge binges, it’s the intangibles – other interests, intuition that you’re a good fit – that can help in closing the deal. Australia – particularly the sector that pulls scarce commodities from the earth with no little risk – always seems to be on the lookout for that good fit.

  5. I have no funny ones, they are all ones that wake you up years later, sweating.

    Who wants to hear my interview gag though? OK, ok…

    “Describe one of your strengths”
    “I perform under pressure really well”
    “Can you give me an example”
    [sings] “Pressure! Pushing down on meee, pushing down on yooo, no one asks for…”

  6. Went to a recruitment guy referred to me by a mate . The recruitment guy had a mod haircut and was also a good drummer with hard rocking Melbourne band Dallas Crane. we talked finance sector jobs, my area for 30 years then got onto the serious stuff of music. I ended up agreeing to send him some material -it wasn’t my CV it was a review of a Nick Cave concert for this place in which I really slagged the show . He loved it.

    Anyway heard little after that, well nothing actually and a month or so later saw him at a DC gig. His first comment was “you are in the wrong business”. He was right of course but having been my experience for 30 years and at the arse end of my working life it was a bit late for that.

    So now I’m retired write bollocks on this blog and continue to see him playing with DC.

    BTW @Sitheref2409 ,when you say remote location , just how remote are you talking because, in Australia there is remote then there is fucking remote.

  7. I interviewed a fella once, and I asked him what his biggest weakness was. A lot of people think this is a trick question, but the emphasis is on identifying an area you want to develop; self-awareness is key. He thought long and hard before declaring that he had no weaknesses.

    I rephrased the question several times, but he was adamant: he had no weaknesses at all. I then asked him why his CV contained multiple uses of lower case ‘i’ to denote the first-person singular. He genuinely didn’t know it was meant to be capitalised. I thought this might spur him into a moment of revelation, but no: he still had no weaknesses.

  8. All my recruitment tales are miserable, I’m afraid. I went self-employed, as a newspaper/magazine writer, between 1994-2001 because I was fed up with crappy interview experiences periodically broken up with crappier short-term jobs. After 10 years in the public sector (which ended with a protracted period of Kafka-esque warfare with a HR department) I went back to being self-employed as a writer… but not before doing one or two interviews for other things.

    One such was an interview for a library person at a Presbyterian Theological College. The chair of the panel was the dourest, most miserable slab of humanity I’ve ever met. I was thinking, ‘Christ, if this is what happens if you work here…’ After a while, in which I sensed the whole thing was going nowhere, he asked – wearily, barely able to be bothered to do so – ‘What is it you think we do here? ‘Churn out Presbyterians’ I replied. And that was the end of that.

    It wasn’t dissimilar to an experience in the early 90s when I went for a library assistant role at the local BBC’s tape archive. After a ludicrous amount of exams etc for such a low-level role, the candidates were whittled down for interviews. I turned up to find SIX people facing me, several of whom spent the next half hour grandstanding in front of each other, asking me impossible judgement-of-Solomon type questions about ‘what would you do if…’ and ‘what would you save from the current BBC NI schedule’ etc. The whole thing was a pompous fiasco. To that latter question, I replied – well, I certainly wouldn’t save Show X (whatever their flagship talk show of the time was) because it’s rubbish. And I bet you wished you’d had the sense to save all those Jimmy Young shows [popular local comedian] from the 70s that you junked.’ Obviously, I had realised by then that I was being barracked by a shower of gits and had no wish to remain there a second longer.

    (As a footnote, many years later I was in a position to return a handful of 1970s radio documentaries to the same BBC archive – quality off-air reels and master copies that I’d inherited from a friend.)

  9. Nothing funny really.

    I once turned up to an interview for Nortel. Gave my name to the receptionist and sat and waited to be summoned into one of the shiny offices.

    After a while, down the central staircase came a bearded man with a coat on and a suitcase giving off a ‘I’m off to somewhere abroad and important’vibe To whom the receptionist said, ‘Oh, this chap’s waiting to see you. For an interview’. He looked at me, horrified (I’m used to it…) then realised he’d fucked up his diary.

    I really just should have said not to bother or can we rearrange but instead allowed myself to be hurried into a small ante-room to be questioned abruptly by this distracted and angry man for 20 minutes until he really had to get into his taxi and begone. I didn’t get or want that job.

    During that same period I turned up for an interview for some sort of service management function at some corporation based in a business park in Slough. I hated the place and the office on sight. After 20 minutes of buzzword-based interview back and forth it struck me that as much as I needed a job I really did not want this particular one at this god-awful place. So, I sighed and said so. “I’m so sorry but I don’t feel I’m suited for you at the moment. May we stop?

    The bloke admitted he’d never had anyone withdraw from an interview so starkly before. He was briefly annoyed but then spent another half an hour running through ‘the answers he’d wanted’ with me. I think he thought I didn’t know what he wanted, when all I wanted was to get outta there.

    • Fantastic, Beezmeister. I can recall something similar myself, circa 1990 – of being in a dismal building, in a dismal room with dismal people and being interviewed for some dismal job or other – about halfway through, I said, ‘Actually, let’s just stop this…’ or something like that and left. Sometimes you just know that working somewhere is going to be more dismal than being unemployed.

    • I went for a job in Archway, North London in the early 90s. A small office with perhaps 10 staff, tops. It was like a scene from Shelley – the interviewer was a really nice guy, but he looked horrifically stressed and spent the whole time moaning about the company and gossiping about his colleagues, who he obviously hated. At one point he told me that I seem ideally suited to the job, but why would I (me) want to even consider working at a place like this?

      He offered me the job by phone the next day and I politely declined. “I don’t blame you” he said.

  10. I think if you are asked the “What makes you unique” question again, “I am reasonably smart, and in the right situation, nimble on my intellectual feet and quick witted.” makes for a pretty good answer, though I much prefer your actual response.

    I spent 6 months driving around Australia, and man, there are some remote locations out there. Good pies to be had every 300 miles or so, though.

  11. A lot of the above commentary makes me wonder why the OP states that being an HR professional is something to be proud of.

    A large proportion of the comments obliquely suggest that HR drones are a bunch on insensitive twunts, a position I’ve had occasion to consider along the way over the past few decades. But I’m sure our correspondent doesn’t fit that pattern!

    Good luck with the interview Si.

    I’ve just done one myself (last Monday) and have no idea how it went. Tappity, tappity on the lappy from both interviewers, gormless standardised questions (there must be a book of these you can buy in WH Smith) that are impossible to answer intelligently. I want the job, actually, but honestly, I could with some justification take the position that anyone dumb enough to interview me like that probably isn’t my idea of a good employer.

  12. HR departments are the worse. I only got the two longest jobs I’ve had (including my current one) after phoning/emailing them a long time after the interviews, as I had heard absolutely nothing. One asked “Oh, are you interested in the job?”.

    Another time I was (99.9%) assured I had the job when leaving the premises after the interview, they just need to work on the offer, then complete silence. I phone them a few weeks later and they said “Oh you didn’t get it after all”, I asked why they hadn’t let me know as I was already starting to plan to move to the new location, the answer “We didn’t want to give you bad news”.

    • My other half went for an interview (internal, she already works in the organisation) for the first time in about 20 years the other week. She narrowly lost out by losing 2 points for not giving enough information on a particular answer. She hadn’t quite appreciated how interviews now are often very precise and measured to appear as fair and equal as possible.

  13. In defence of Si’s profession, Mrs F is in HR. What you don’t see is all the shit the HR team have to deal with.

    1. Being on the receiving end of whining. Nobody ever goes to HR to tell them they love their job, only to vent their frustration.
    2. Chasing people who go AWOL.
    3. Telling people off for behaving like twats to their colleagues.
    4. Supporting the family when breadwinner goes into hospital/dies suddenly/becomes disabled.

    And lots of similar stuff. You get the idea.

    She’s developed a pretty thick skin ove the years, which is probably how she can tolerate me and my vinyl/microphone/bass guitar collections.

    • Some of that reminds me of my sister’s travails as union rep. in her place of work, one of the big supermarket chains (she is now retired).
      Dealing on the one hand with arrogant, incompetetent and ignorant local management that often broke basic employment law, and on the other with a minority of whining, dishonest slacker colleagues, all the time trying to do her best for the rest of them who were just trying to do their jobs and earn a fair day’s pay.

    • Fair enough, I am taking of my experience with HR regarding recruitment, would probably be more positive regarding other matters especially in North America where directors of HR are particularly big fish in comparison to Europe.

    • All of those. Plus:

      Actually coming up with people strategies that help both the people and the business.
      And the lassie who came to me because she was being stalked by a colleague.
      And the guy for whom I had to get personal security because he was a gun threat and had threatened a few people, me included when I fired him. (Between me and my friends, we’ve had personal security more than once each, and that included Amy having people sleep in her apartment)
      And the woman with mental health issues who, because of the work I put in fighting her management team, now has a successful career and is well.
      And standing up in the room when the guy we were firing was about to come over the table to my female friend.

      Yup. I’ve had the glamour roles. If people – and I’m looking at you, shitty managers – actually knew how to use good HR people, everyone would be better off.

      • Yep, all the glamour:

        Getting workplace adaptations for the employee diagnosed with MS.
        Working with the rozzers to convict two employees who’d been stealing company laptops and flogging them on eBay.
        Working with the rozzers and family of an employee who’d attempted to kill his wife and kids and them himself.
        And so on.

        My HR partner got me reduced tasks when I was diagnosed with Crohn’s (I no longer have to travel for business) and a special £1000 “pregnancy” chair (one with extra lumbar support), which keeps my back straight and guts in alignment, and a desk near a disabled toilet. She’s not reading this, but Thanks, Charlie.

  14. I went to university with a chap who applied wildly for things in the first months after graduating. I recall him telling me at that time that he had received 100 (or whatever it was) rejection letters – including one for a job that he swore he hadn’t actually applied for! Maybe the word had got around and prospective (non-)employers were simply saving time…

    20+ years later, after I had escaped from my regrettable sojourn in the public sector, and in the brief window before I committed to self-employment again (which has turned out to be a wise move), I met this chap again – he turned up as head of a panel for a public archive to which I had applied. He was very gracious in spotting my name and coming out for a breezy chat beforehand, to avoid awkwardness ‘in the room’. I gave a very professional interview, focused on dreary corporate experience, qualifications, etc. I met my old pal for coffee a week later… and he said, ‘You didn’t get the job – why didn’t you mention your books?!?’ I’d had two published at that point and it hadn’t occurred to me that the history research aspect could be a good USP in the interview – I had tried too hard to be Mr Boring! 😀

  15. With no disrespect to Si or Mrs Fenton, my own experience of HR c.2008-10 was horrific. I met some appalling people, including one who was infuriatingly illogical – she literally kept insisting 18+2 = 19 (in a matter about additional points for additional work). Oh, it was painful…

    I home-recorded a song about the experience at the time and found it again recently. It was cathartic at the time. Here it is with a montage…

    “It’s a paralysis machine,m it’s the place where all hope goes to die…’

      • Both, that wasn’t meant to sound boastful or narcissistic, if that’s how it came across. I’ve had three jobs since leaving university twelve years ago, and all of them have been better than the previous one (for different reasons).

        I’ve also had many, many interviews – particularly between leaving university and getting the first job. I was rejected so many times that at one point my parents threatened to kick me out of the house because they assumed I wasn’t making an effort. Their justification was along the lines of “that kid who dropped out of school at the age of 14 with no qualifications has just got a job, why can’t you get one with a university degree?” I finally got the first job because I genuinely loved what they did, and I loved the idea of working for them – and I like to think that enthusiasm for the product showed.

        In the last six months, I’ve been threatened with redundancy, and subsequently been made redundant. In those months, I applied for a considerable number of jobs. In hope, in desperation. I tried different tactics. I would go through various job sites, only choosing ones I was interested in, that didn’t work. I’d apply for any I thought I could do, that didn’t get me a job. I watched on enviously as most of my colleagues jumped ship before the inevitable happened.

        I had a handful of interviews before I got this job. I knew that if I’d accepted any other offer it would’ve only been because it’s better to have a job you don’t like than no job at all. Fortunately, I managed to get a job I genuinely like. I’m lucky, but only in retrospect.

        Sorry for waffling.

  17. I found myself interviewing for a number of posts in my last few years working for a London local authority.
    The wisdom I would impart from this is that interviews should last no longer than 10 minutes. The successful candidates will identify themselves within a few minutes. The rest of the time is wasted.
    Local authorities employ objective marking systems. The interview panel meets a few days before the interviews take place. Using the job description and the person specification a list of questions are drawn up, which will be given to every candidate.
    I have had been in interviews that have just gone on and on. I have been sitting there thinking “I wish you would shut up. You have no chance of getting this job and all you are doing is boring the shit out of me”. But we have to be fair and ask everyone the same questions. There is some flexibility in being able to ask supplementary questions, but the agreed list has to be asked so the candidates can be scored and scores compared.
    I can’t think of a single candidate who started off giving crap answers who then turned it around. On the other hand you quickly can identify people with the right aptitude, experience and qualifications who can do the job. Both the winners and rejects will be quickly identified.
    I’m not talking about jobs for chief paperclip sorter, but jobs where people have to be able to interact well with a diverse range of people. Where they have to be able to use their brain.

    • I know the idea that “you know immediately” is quite fashionable.

      The problem is that research data tells us that this is in fact wrong and is entirely the result of subjective reactions.

        • It is possible for a person to be skilled at creating a good impression while being interviewed but not much use at being actually employed.
          On the other hand, if the candidate irritates the panel members, he will not be getting the job.

    • 10 mins! Would like that.I have had interviews with about 10 people lasting total of 6 or 7 hrs. Did once get 7 separate job offers in the same day though…

  18. I recently had an interview at a civil service department. I was quite surprised to get it as it was weeks after my application, but off I trotted on the day. Trains fine…not so the tubes. Utter chaos, platforms packed…I managed to get on a train after watching my contingency time disappear, jumped in a cab which cost £16 and made it on time. Not so one of the “panel”. They kept me waiting for 20 minutes, during which the office idiot gave me a tour, and finally we sat down. The missing person still wasn’t there, apparently stuck in tube chaos (which I had managed to negotiate). The two who were sat behind open laptops typing constantly, and asked incredibly specific questions which gave no room at all to talk around the subject to demonstrate experience – “give us one specific example of where you took a decision with incomplete information”….in my line of work this happens all the time. Mr and Mrs took turns asking questions, sat with 1000 yard stares and weird moony like fixed smiles. After each response they said “Thank you that was really interesting” mechanically. No follow up questions, no broad discussion. Missing Late Guy arrived after half an hour. Mrs Interviewer jumped up, bundled him out and returned alone. On we went. By now I had decided this place wasn’t for me. Finally it was over and I got out of there and had a bacon sandwich in a cafe in Aldgate to cheer myself up.

    A few weeks went by. Finally I received an email saying they weren’t going to proceed, and offering some feedback of the smarmiest HR nob type. Headings such as “What we really liked”, “What we’d have loved to hear”, “What you might like to consider” etc. Most of which was not possible with their rigid interview structure. Fair’s fair, I thought. So I took their HR nob feedback structure and provided them with some feedback too. A while screen of feedback actually. All basic best practice interview techniques which junior managers know. They didn’t reply.

    • “give us one specific example of where you took a decision with incomplete information”

      I’ve decided right here and now that you lot are a bunch of corporate morons with fuck-all in the way of intelligence, imagination, common humanity or professionalism, and there’s little prospect of my accepting any role you offer me, irrespective of the remuneration. Obviously, I only have incomplete information upon which to base this decision, but the breadth and depth of my experience allows me to draw this conclusion with a very high degree of confidence. Goodbye.

  19. About twenty years ago I had an interview for a position as an in-house designer at a university. At the time I was working as an in-house designer at another university. The job I had before that was as an in-house designer at the university I was having the interview with.

    Apparently it came down to me and one other person, and they got the gig – my work looked “too corporate.”

    • You may have heard of Bunnings, a massive hardware , tradie stuff and homeware warehouse style chain in Australia. I believe they have had a bad experience taking over a UK outfit.

      They hire a lot of people, esp casuals esp in peak seasons like now. Minimum wage of course. Feeling I acually should do something after my enforced retirement I applied for a job as a casual last Christmas. First it involved 20 multiple choice scenarios, presumably to assess your ability to prioritise , reflect their values etc. A few times I never got past this point. This time, I did. Go figure.
      I received a call from a youngster who asked me a couple of describe a situation type questions which seemed to go ok as I was asked to attend stage 3 at the Warehouse seeking staff. There were maybe 15 of us waiting for the meeting. Old, young, fat thin, male female assorted nationalities. In we were herded to be spoken to by a very upbeat perky supervisor with the walls ringed with people with clipboards -all wearing Bunnings red and green outfits. He explained don’t feel bad if you don’t get the job fist time etc. He then said 500 people had applied for these 5 casual positions. There had been 5 of these sessions that day and mote again tomorrow. So about 150 people being herded through.

      We had to watch a video of people fucking up and say why they had. Then started some group work. Oh no. We were given some materials and had to make a product, have a pitch for its use and an idea of pricing. All along I am thinking ,having beeen a senior manager for many years, “dont take over ,dont take over” esp being right in front of some clipboard people. So instead I’m going”yeah that’s great but do you think we should try, yeah that’s great ( thinks fucking stupid idea). It was awful. After all the teams had presented our time was up and we were told that those who made it to the next round would have a F2F interview with a warehouse foreman and then the final candidates would be interviewed by the store manager.

      So a 5 stage process for 5 minimum wage casual jobs.

      I never heard back and I haven’t applied again.

  22. Can I be the pedant who points out that mitochondrial DNA is not unique to you? It passes down the maternal line, so baring mutations you share it with your mother, her mother etc.

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