HE walked into the interview wearing a gray polyester suit. Strike one. Underneath his miracle-of-science jacket was a floral-print shirt – loud to the eyes the way Metallica is to the ears – unbuttoned to reveal his chest. Strike two.
A shoulder-length mane of golden-blond hair meant strike three, while the firecracker snap of gum being power-chewed brought No. 4.
But Frank Matthews, then an HR executive at U.S. Homes, is nothing if not polite, so he indulged the applicant with a few questions. Could he provide income verification from previous jobs?
No, the applicant replied.
Could he show some tax returns, which would easily solve the problem?
No, he couldn’t – because as a resident of the separatist “Republic of Texas” he’d never paid income taxes.
While human resources execs can rattle off the everyday gaffes job seekers make, they take particular glee in recalling encounters with those better qualified for admission to a psychiatric hospital than a job in middle management.
A human resources executive (who didn’t want to be named) recalls a candidate he encountered while working at a woman’s apparel firm. Though the applicant was inexperienced, he was impressive enough for an interview. Which was going reasonably well until he was asked why he was interested in the business – and began revealing a fetishistic obsession with women’s clothes.
“It really became kind of disgusting,” the exec says.
Erotic obsessions rarely vault a candidate to the top of the list. Trudy Steinfeld, the director of the career development center at NYU, says one promising job seeker crashed and burned during a mock workshop when she gave an off-color seminar exploring the dual orbs of female anatomy.
“We were just shocked,” says Steinfeld. “And she didn’t even do a good job at it.”
Women aren’t the only ones to reveal an ill-advised chest obsession in an interview. One West Coast HR exec remembers interviewing a man who wanted a job at a conservative hotel chain.
He asked if piercings or tattoos would be a problem. The exec replied that they wouldn’t, as long as they weren’t visible. The man then lifted his shirt to expose a pair of pierced nipples. Ouch!
Some applicants need reminding that interviews are G-rated not just for sexual situations but also for language. David, a senior HR executive for a major media company, tried an old interviewing technique on one candidate, who took it as a sign he was joining a fraternity.
“One trick is to just be very casual to see if they’d let their guard down. And boy did he let his guard down,” says David.
Curse words flew out of the guy’s mouth – his last boss was an “a – – hole,” for example – until David could only gape in shock. After a spell, the candidate realized he was being too familiar, but his newfound self-consciousness oddly reinforced his blue streak.
It was like “he had an out of body experience,” says David – who also recalls an interviewee who pulled a Sharon Stone by showing up unencumbered by underwear.
If a job seeker is sexist, racist and self-pitying, it’s best he leaves those lovely qualities at the office door. JoAnn Peterson, vice president of human resources at Kimball Hill Homes, once interviewed a construction supervisor whose first move was to give her the up-and-down, oh-you’re-a-chick look.
“It was all downhill from there,” says Peterson. The man kept inquiring about her ethnic background – “Peterson? Is that Swedish?” – as well as the ethnicity of his possible supervisor. (“Is he German?”) He revealed he was Slavic, and that one of his daughters was blind and had to use a seeing-eye dog.
“It was so painful for me,” Peterson says, laughing. “Honestly, I thought I was being filmed [as a prank]. I thought it would be shown at a training session later on.”