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Worst interview experiences


Stellaboz

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3 hours ago, Hedgecutter said:

Went for an interview at a golf 'resort' in Fife as a teenager, which at the time reeked of manure and decomposing hay, with mud all over the roads because it was attached to a working farm.

Got asked by the manager "what would you do if somebody like Rod Stewart came up to you, as that's the kind of person we're looking to attract here".  I just burst out laughing in an unambiguous 'aye right' manner.   Never understood why I never heard back.  <_<

 

Eta:  I also turned up for a PhD interview in bog standard clothing, not quite realising that suit and tie seems to be standard attire even though it's effectively applying to be a student again.  Never got that one, but got another years on having learnt my lesson.  Ties: serious business.

It's probably common to wear a suit and tie for an interview, but in most cases I doubt it would be a dealbreaker for an interviewer. I know quite a few people who have turned up for an interview for academic lecturing jobs in jeans and a shirt or the like and still got it. Might depend on the discipline and university I suppose - I doubt that would fly at stuck up places like Oxford or Cambridge or in flashy tryhard departments like business or economics.

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1 hour ago, Slacker said:

I turned up in a suit and tie for an interview to be a part-time steward with G4S, held at Ibrox Stadium. Everyone else was in t-shirt and jeans and I felt like such a fanny I just walked out.

Walking away?

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2 hours ago, craigkillie said:

It's probably common to wear a suit and tie for an interview, but in most cases I doubt it would be a dealbreaker for an interviewer. I know quite a few people who have turned up for an interview for academic lecturing jobs in jeans and a shirt or the like and still got it. Might depend on the discipline and university I suppose - I doubt that would fly at stuck up places like Oxford or Cambridge or in flashy tryhard departments like business or economics.

Funnily enough, my (admittedly limited) experience of these departments at Universities are that the staff were often failures in industry who’ve had to then teach as a backup option. The number of business lecturers who worked in industry for a few years before realising (or being told) they couldn’t hack it then becoming a lecturer or researcher and staying in teaching for 20 years was high. These types may want people to dress in suits to pretend they still work in industry.

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I think this makes sense. People who have enough of a passion for these subjects to study them at university are typically doing it because they imagine themselves having a career in business or finance, and will therefore likely pursue that within industry once their degree is done, since that's the best place to prove yourself as a good businessperson. Therefore it does stand to reason that a lot of lecturers will be people who have gone and tried that and failed, along with perhaps some idealists who realise that they actually prefer the notion of teaching and studying business rather than actually being involved.

This is somewhat different to a lot of scientific disciplines where the best place to explore the science in more detail is actually within a university setting, where you can be involved in state of the art scientific research. There are some companies who actively do scientific research, but most of them are more application-focused.

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3 hours ago, craigkillie said:

It's probably common to wear a suit and tie for an interview, but in most cases I doubt it would be a dealbreaker for an interviewer. I know quite a few people who have turned up for an interview for academic lecturing jobs in jeans and a shirt or the like and still got it. Might depend on the discipline and university I suppose - I doubt that would fly at stuck up places like Oxford or Cambridge or in flashy tryhard departments like business or economics.

In my current job, One of the five interviewers told me (upon commenting on my suit) that I didn’t have to get dressed up for them!

on the oxford comment, PhD students have to (or at least had to) wear a penguin suit for their PhD viva.

Edited by mathematics
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23 minutes ago, mathematics said:

on the oxford comment, PhD students have to (or at least had to) wear a penguin suit for their PhD viva.

Good to see even those at Oxford can have a laugh sometimes.

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I didn't delete any of my posts. Couldn't give a shit whether I am wrong or not. If my posts have gone you'd need to ask a moderator.
Ah shit. That's right! It's 5/36. Trick question by the sounds of it.
ETA. It can't be 5/36 either because if only one 4+4 exists then that reduces the number of possible combinations.
If you are right about 4+4 then that must exclude one of each of 1+1, 2+2, 3+3, 5+5 and 6+6 from the total combinations. So that would be 5 possibilities from 30......which is still 1 in 6.
So we're back to 1/6.

If that's the general idea then it can't be 100% because when you sum the probabilities of each square you get more than 1.
It would have to be 1/40 for each square (equal probabilities) with a total then of 1.
I think you are correct about taking 'n' to infinity.

Two posts seem to have disappeared

It's good to admit if one is wrong however.

We live and learn
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8 minutes ago, oaksoft said:

It's certainly not standard practice to wear a suit and tie to a PhD interview. Some people do it I suppose but most don't seem to bother. As long as you are smart enough and not displaying any genitalia there shouldn't be a problem.

Ah.

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10 hours ago, Honest_Man#1 said:

 I asked if he’d read it and he said “no my wife applied for this, she does all this stuff for me”. Asked him if I should really be interviewing his wife instead and we finished the interview quite quickly.

That's a fuckin' mile oot. The amount of men who get their wife to deal with their money/make their phone calls is atrocious.

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Now I think about it, I went for an assessment centre (group interview day type shit) for one of the better paying North Sea companies, so I quite fancied the job. No one at my work knew I was going.

I can still remember the sinking feeling I got when a guy off another shift at my work tipped up and made a bee line across the lobby for me. He was dressed like a fucking tink, and was very difficult to understand when he spoke. He was also quite a confrontational guy. Anyway I dont know how well or not I did in the other parts of the day, but come the group exercise at the end, I pretty much abandoned all hope and sank into my chair as this oaf set about falling out with everyone at the table and looking to me for backup. Horrendous.

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I once had an interview for a call centre job with the English Student Loans Company (outsourced to Glasgow, naturally) where the interviewer was obviously very, very stoned. 

The first part started with a group interview and after that we were then taken, one at a time, for a one-on-one interview. I was the last of ten or so to go which meant I must have been waiting for over an hour to be seen. The room was absolutely stifling as the air-con in he building had broken so it was a real challenge to stay awake. Then, in the actual interview room, it was even hotter - to the point that it was a very uncomfortable environment to be in. Halfway through answering a question I realised that I couldn't remember what the question was. I had to admit this to the interviewer, at which point he had to  admit that he also couldn't remember what he'd just asked. The interview was the wound up shortly thereafter. 

Seeing as I was the last person to be interviewed, he decided to walk me to the exit of the building upon its conclusion , but he somehow managed to get us hopelessly lost. Eventually, after about five minutes we made our way out a fire escape and into an alleyway where I went on my merry way and he probably started ripping a bong behind some bins. 

Amazingly, about an hour later I got a call to say I was being offered the job. I didn't take it in the end, but to this day I'm still unsure as to whether I did well in the rest of the interview so was offered it on that basis or whether I just came across as the exact kind of reprobate they were looking for. 

 

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I went for an interview for a call centre job through an agency once when I was still on the piss. Got rejected cos I've got a breach of the peace on my criminal record and the guy was a bit of a knob so I pished all over the lift on the way out.

Went to another call centre one around the same time and the guy looked at my CV and basically told me I wasn't what they were looking for. So I shat in the lift on the way out. 

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13 minutes ago, Sir Kevin Of Kilsyth said:

I went for an interview for a call centre job through an agency once when I was still on the piss. Got rejected cos I've got a breach of the peace on my criminal record and the guy was a bit of a knob so I pished all over the lift on the way out.

Went to another call centre one around the same time and the guy looked at my CV and basically told me I wasn't what they were looking for. So I shat in the lift on the way out. 

 

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