Interviews are never easy. Whether you have a job interview or an interview for a student scholarship, the night before the interview is always full of anxiety. You are left thinking about all the things that can go wrong. And to your surprise, panicking never helps.
This article is not going to help you prepare for an interview. Instead, it will shed light on what can go wrong if you do not prepare for an interview. Still, the first and most important piece of advice would be to keep calm. After all, recruiters are often nervous when searching for the best candidates, and they, just like you, take time to prepare for the interviews.
Funny Recruitment Interview Experiences
During the pandemic, a lot has changed, starting from how businesses operate and how they hire. Many organizations used to take face-to-face interviews before the COVID outbreak. But due to the worldwide lockdown, it is not possible anymore.
This way, more and more organizations are switching to online interviews. Here is one such story for you.
An organization invited a candidate for an online interview, where he would be asked multiple questions and given only 30 seconds for each answer. The answers were recorded and sent to the senior management, who had the final say in who gets hired.
The candidate answered the first few questions without any trouble. But at almost the end of the interview, he was asked a trick question. He didn’t know the full answer, so he had to stop talking after 15 seconds. But, he wasn’t ready to get rejected based on a question that he failed to answer. This is why he stared right into the camera for the remaining 15 seconds, to fool the managers into thinking the video froze.
Let’s hear another story. While attending video conferences, we normally do not dress like we would for a face-to-face interview. We are mostly concerned about what the upper part of our body looks like. We do not care much about what pants we are wearing. And honesty, many of us attend meetings wearing our pajamas.
A candidate joined in an interview for a big tech company wearing a fancy shirt and a tie. He was still in his morning pajamas. Halfway through the interviews, the candidate was asked to complete a few tasks. He would require a pen and paper for that. So he stood up from his chair and went into his reading room to collect a piece of paper and a pen, unaware of the fact that the interview board could see his pajamas as he stood up.
If you have an interview sometime soon, here are a few tips for you.
- Decide what you are going to wear in advance.
- Figure out how you would commute to the office, and how much time it would take you to reach there. Plan your trip accordingly.
- Make a list of the most common interview questions and practice well.
- Look into the background of your interviewers.
- Print out all the necessary documents that you would need, including your resume.
Funny Recruitment Questions
Interviews are not always stressful. If you are lucky, you might attend the interview board with a decent sense of humor.
Moreover, if you want to crack a joke in an interview, you increase your chances of getting hired. It tells the employer that you are capable of blowing off steam even in stressful situations.
Here is a quick joke tip for you. When the interviewer asks you to tell them something about yourself, you can simply crack a joke by saying, you better not answer this question as you need the job.
Did your past job not end on a good note? Most of us have such an experience in our lives. No matter why you resigned from your past job, chances are you would be asked about your explanation in almost every future job interview you attend.
If you are not ready to give your explanation, you can simply joke by saying your prior employers relocated to a new office and forgot to give you the address.
Tricky Job Interviews
Which football team do you support, Barcelona or Real Madrid? These are simply trick questions. There is nothing the employer can learn from your answer to this question other than how good are you at handling trick questions.
While answering the trick questions, you should not think about winning or losing. No matter which answers you pick, always make sure you have a solid justification to back it up with.
Some examples of such trick questions are given below:
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- What is your favorite video game?
- What would you do if you had a time machine?
- If you are given the option of becoming a god, what power would you want?
- Tell me about your recent traveling experience.
- If you could be an animal, what would you be?
- If you could be any superhero, which one would you be?
As far as non-tricky questions go — questions that can actually tell recruiters about the candidate’s personality — you can check out several examples here.
A final tip would be to remember that recruiters are human, too, and they enjoy a good laugh. Of course, you are not supposed to entertain a recruiter, but showing your personal side will not hurt.
Images source: pixabay.com
