Title: Two-Faced Interviewer
General Information about Item:
- Verbal Folklore
- English
- Country where Item is from: US
Informant Data:
- Andrew Wolff is a junior at Dartmouth College and a Quantatative Social Science major from New Jersey. His mother is a college advisor and his father a sales representative for medical journals. He is a brother in the Alpha Chi fraternity, is involved in TAMID, a Dartmouth consulting group for Israeli start-ups, and organized the Dartmouth Model UN Conference. He is currently planning on joining a consulting firm after graduation, and became involved in corporate recruiting during his Sophmore Summer after hearing about it from his brothers at Alpha Chi.
Contextual Data:
- Cultural Context: Corporate recruiting has a stress-interview component, where candidates are expected to respond to difficult questions under stressful conditions to test how well people stand up to high-pressure environments. How these stressful conditions are created varies from interview to interview.
Item:
- This was a personal horror story that Andrew later shared with his fraternity brothers after the experience. In a first-round interview, the interviewer approached the candidates and seemed very kind and nice, but the minute the interview started, he did a complete about-face and became very argumentative and combative, picking apart every answer that Andrew gave. As a result of the bad interview experience, after the interview was over, Andrew reworked his company preference order to remove that company from his top position, only to find out later by the same inteviewer that Andrew did very well in the interview and would have been given the job if the priority order had been left alone.
Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):
Transcript of Associated File:
- “In a first round, there was a guy who was really nice when he first walked in, and then we start the interview and he just got like really really mean, just like challenging everything I said, like making it seem like I wasn’t communicating my ideas effectively, like ‘I’m asking you about a time when you were challenged by a different opinion and you keep skipping over the difficult parts. I need you to go back and outline, you’re not giving me what we’re looking for.’ And during the case, he was really combative with my answers, he would just be like after everything I say, just be like ‘so, is that all? are you sure that’s what you want to do?’ And then as soon as the case was over, he just like switched again into this nice dude, and he actually rattled me enough that I, um, and I knew which office he was from that after that interview, and my second round interview, which went… my second first round interview, which went a lot better I switched the preferences of my office. But it turned out that the guy was the one who actually called me to give me the final round, and told me that he was sorry that I switched my preferences because you did a great job, and I was like you could have been a little bit nicer.”
Informant’s Comments:
- This is one of Andrew’s main horror stories he shares with other people going through the corporate recruiting process.
Collector’s Comments:
- The stress interview itself may not be folklore, since it is a formalized part of the actual interview process, but in Andrew’s telling this personal experience repeatedly to other people as both a funny horror story and a word of caution against too readily reacting to what you think was a bad interview, it becomes a part of the verbal folklore surrounding corporate recruiting.
Collector’s Name: Aime Joo
Tags/Keywords:
- Corporate Recruiting Folklore, Stress Interviews, Verbal Folklore, Horror Stories