Worst interviews: ‘They told us to screw up’

Lae arrived in time for a job interview at a solicitor’s office in Bristol.

But after 20 minutes it was canceled and asked to come back the next day.

She was upset, only to receive a text later saying that the “cancel” was actually a test that had failed. He didn’t get the job.

The experience, he says, was “totally weird” and it prompted him to start his own business, which he’s confident will stick to a simpler recruiting style.

Lae is not alone. According to recruitment agency Hays, more than half of people have had a negative experience when interviewing for a new job.

The BBC heard the stories of dozens of people who went through strange, offensive and unusual interviews.

But what can bad interviews teach us? What can interviewers and interviewers do to make the experience less suspicious?

Like Lae, Aixin Fu had a strange experience when she applied for a minimum wage student ambassador job at a university.

During the group interview, everyone was asked to crawl on their hands and knees and “scoot like a cow.”

“We did it for about three or four minutes,” he recalls.

“At that time I was very nervous. It was very inappropriate.

“But there was a bit of peer pressure because everyone was doing it.”

According to the interviewer, they try to see if the candidates are “fun”, although Ms Fu suspects “maybe a bit of a power trip from someone”.

Julie, from Missouri, US, says she’s learned that interviewers can sometimes be “really isolated” from being the interviewee.

That was his takeaway from a video interview he did to become a part-time copywriter in 2022.

At first it felt like everything was going well. “I was ticking all the boxes,” he says.

But near the end, our interviewer asked: “How many years do you think you have left?”

“I’m in my early 60s,” says Julie. “I won’t be retired for a long time.”

Age isn’t the only bias people can face during an interview.

Content marketing manager Pearl Kasirye said she was asked about her heritage during a second interview for a part-remote PR role at a fashion brand in Milan.

Ms Kasirye lives in London and left Uganda as a child to live and study in Europe.

She says her employer insists on paying her Ugandan salary rather than her London salary to work remotely because of her background.

He chose to withdraw his application.

“You can’t control where you are,” he says, adding that he’s been interviewing people ever since and is “very careful” with his questions.

Sometimes the bias may be accidental—or at least less obvious—but still just as difficult for the interviewer.

Tom (not his real name) is an IT engineer who was once asked to record answers to questions for a warehouse assistant job rather than talking to someone in a formal interview.

Tom describes himself as being on the autism spectrum, although he doesn’t like to share this with people.

He says he needs clear instructions during an interview and prefers to talk face-to-face, describing the filming process as “like talking to a computer”.

Many people also told the BBC they had been discriminated against on the basis of their gender in recruitment.

According to recruitment platform Applied, nearly one in five women were asked whether they had or planned to have children during the recruitment process.

One of them is Applied CEO Khyati Sundaram, who says he’s been asked “more times than I can count.”

It is illegal for employers to ask candidates about their marital status, whether they have children or whether they plan to have children.

However, Applied found the problem was even worse for women applying for senior positions, where two-fifths of women were asked the same question.

One of the reasons, says Ms Sundaram, is the perceived “economic vulnerability” of pregnancy. “The higher the fee, the more maternity you have to pay when finding cover, and they don’t want the hassle.”

Sometimes the hiring process is bad, not because of bias, but because, as Ms. Sundaram says, “There is no criterion for looking good on the interviewer’s side.”

His main advice for interviewers is to ask the same questions to every candidate and design them with “marginal groups” in mind.

As for Aixin Fu, she says her experience has taught her to be more assertive in future interviews, especially if she’s asked to do something “weird, off base, or not a job requirement,” like mooing like a cow.