Weird interview/job offer experiences?

I was trying to think of any weird ones I'd had recently, but then I read yours and...wow. That's definitely interesting. Last year I had applied to I think 142 positions between December and June. I got pretty good at interviews, but most were standard.

My only ones that seemed odd were:

A phone interview, first time I had spoken with them. The guy asks me about my background, so it was pretty normal. Then I'm expecting some kind of questions, but instead I got, "Well, the job is yours if you want it. Just let me know!" It was a federal position too.

Had a phone interview with Northrop Grumman. About a month later they fly me from Illinois to California for an in-person interview. I think my interview was for 9, and my interviewer didn't show up until just after 10. Didn't have anywhere to interview me set up, so we just borrowed some empty office. Didn't talk one bit about work, but I did find out about some Grand Prix they hold in Venice Beach I think, and heard about how close they were to Vegas, except that the cops suck and you'll get tickets on the drive. Unless you drive through the middle of the desert. I kept trying to steer it towards work type stuff, but she wasn't having any of it (she was probably mid-late 40's). That was pretty weird. Spent all that money to fly me out, rental car, hotel, and she didn't even remember my interview. Worst of all, I got a call about 2 months later from the HR department asking me to apply for the same position. "I applied for that several months ago and even interviewed." "Oh, well do you mind applying again?" Uh, yes actually...fuck you.

Back during undergrad, I was going through the interviewing phase for Price Waterhouse (four rounds). My second round consisted of me sitting in one of the partner's hotel rooms and watch college football. He didn't ask me a thing about myself, since I went to a big college football team, all he wanted to do was talk football. I made it to the next round and he never really spoke to me.

Oh, and I had one interview where we interviewed by V.P.'s of the company. One of them initiated a stare down with me and didn't say a work for 20 minutes. That was his thing. He wanted to see how we handled up under pressure. The other V.P. asked me my hobbies. I told him I was into powerlifting, the next thing I know he's feeling my muscles. I did get the job, though.

Lyrical_sl said:

I told him I was into powerlifting, the next thing I know he's feeling my muscles. I did get the job, though.

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Haha awesome!

I did quite a bit of interviewing while doing my MBA so I had a few weird ones. I was interviewing with a large power company, and the woman who interviewed me would litteraly ask a question and then write down the answer while a recent grad from another MBA program just stared at me bored out of his mind for an hour. They did this with all 16 interviewees. I tried to crack a joke and they gave me a dirty look so I gave up even though I had already decided that I didn't want to work there. A classmate of mine did not give up on trying to lighten the mood to the point that they told him something to the effect of, "We don't joke around in interviews."

Another day I was doing a marathon session/week of interviews. About 6 hours in I had to go interview for a consulting job that I thought I wasn't going to get, and I was kind of bummed that I had blown my last interview due to exhaustion. So as I'm hanging out going through the motions I'm chatting up an alum who works there, and he goes to check to see if my interviewer is ready and hes not. Eventually a different partner comes out pissed that I'm late which totally isn't my fault, and it gets explained away.

As I'm walking into the room she asks how my day has been going, and I jokingly say, "It's been going great. I've been telling everyone how awesome I am all day!"
She fires back at me, "Tell me how awesome you are in 60 seconds. Go."
I quizzically say, "What?" and she just says, "Go. Now."
So I launch into my spiel, and end with, "and that's why I'm awesome." Somewhat surprisingly I got that job.

I had another interview where I ended up in an argument with a financial strategy guy from a major firm who didn't know that he shouldn't be applying the same cost of capital to every project. We must of argued about that for 10 mins at which point I knew I wasn't getting the job. And, then there was the woman from a major insurance company who seemed like she was reading a script, and just looking looking through me. She could have been having the same interview if nobody else was in the room. A friend of mine interviewed with the company and had the exact same experience. The weird part was that they asked both of us to interview, and then didn't really ask us any questions. Neither one of us were called back either. It was completely bizarre.

At this one very, very large chemical company the asked me what I thought of the election which is usually a conversation that you don't have.

A coworker of mine was trying to become a firefighter. Trying to get on as a full time paid firefighter is very competitive I guess (at least in my area). They have to go through all kinds of testing and stuff and finish in the very top percentage just to get the interviews usually.

One interview, the only question the guy asked him was "If I were to give you an orange, how would you go about eating it?" He went into a fairly detailed description about how he would peel the orange then break off a slice at a time. He didn't end up getting the job and was mind-fucked for a couple of weeks over that question. I was convinced that prior to the interview they had already decided who to give the position to based on some political BS and they were just fucking with him.

opiate82_sl said:

A coworker of mine was trying to become a firefighter. Trying to get on as a full time paid firefighter is very competitive I guess (at least in my area). They have to go through all kinds of testing and stuff and finish in the very top percentage just to get the interviews usually.

One interview, the only question the guy asked him was "If I were to give you an orange, how would you go about eating it?" He went into a fairly detailed description about how he would peel the orange then break off a slice at a time. He didn't end up getting the job and was mind-fucked for a couple of weeks over that question. I was convinced that prior to the interview they had already decided who to give the position to based on some political BS and they were just fucking with him.

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I was once asked in an interview, "If you could be any salad dressing, which one would you be?"

Nothing major, was getting the run down of company history and such when one of the guys (Was 4 guys sitting in on the FIRST interview, weird) and he accidentally swore. Realized it and asked if I was offended.

"Fuck No, im not offended"

Got the job.

opiate82_sl said:

A coworker of mine was trying to become a firefighter. Trying to get on as a full time paid firefighter is very competitive I guess (at least in my area). They have to go through all kinds of testing and stuff and finish in the very top percentage just to get the interviews usually.

One interview, the only question the guy asked him was "If I were to give you an orange, how would you go about eating it?" He went into a fairly detailed description about how he would peel the orange then break off a slice at a time. He didn't end up getting the job and was mind-fucked for a couple of weeks over that question. I was convinced that prior to the interview they had already decided who to give the position to based on some political BS and they were just fucking with him.

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Sounds like more of that new age Business shit rather than something they would ask a Firefighter. They ask wierd questions like this and its supposed to map to a charted answer depending on whether you cut it, peel it, eat it whole etc. Total BS and assigns a score that charts your personality at the end. Almost like character creation in a shitty RPG.

Oh, when I was interviewing for grad school, the Dean asked me to apply the physics equation of water displacement. It was a complicated problem. Only I wasn't going to school for Physics, I was going for B-school. He was one of these guys who earned graduate degrees in Engineering, and then swapped over to business. He wanted to see how we could fix problems on the fly.

One time I received a call back to schedule an interview. I show up to the interview and they seat me in a conference room with about 20 other people. Then the interviewer comes in and says, "We didn't want to take all the time that would be required to interview you all separately, so we're going to do a group interview." He proceeded to ask interview questions like, "What's your biggest weakness?" and "Where do you see yourself in a year?" But not directed at any specific person, instead he expected people to raise their hands with their answers, like a classroom.

One of the most bizarre experiences of my life.

Back in my younger days I went for a job as a Coca-Cola stock dude. Pay wasn't too bad, good benefits, etc. When I went for my in-person interview it was really weird. First I was about 30 minutes late, as this was pre-GPS and in the Providence area. I showed up at the warehouse and we basically did the interview right there in the warehouse. The guy looked at what I was wearing (business casual) and asked me if I expected to be working in that, I of course said no this is just how I dress for interviews. He then told me he was hungry and his buddy brought him a shitload of taco bell. He asked me if I wanted any, and I didn't want to turn him down. We spent the rest of the interview eating tacos. Then I left. Got the call the next day that I got the job.

Never really had to be interviewed for a job (Blockbuster in highschool notwithstanding), but I do interview a lot of guys for construction jobs. Most go about as you'd expect, where you try to figure out if the guy is as big of an alcoholic as he looks etc. Only a couple have ever gone really weird, and all of them had to do with religion where the applicant starts talking about God or their religion in response to a question that had nothing to do with either of them. I can't really think of any specific stories, but I always find that so bizarre. Sometimes I hire the guy anyways because they otherwise seem like good people, sometimes I don't because I can just tell they won't last a minute on a job site. It depends. Like I said, it's just so bizarre that a question like "so you have good availability during the week and won't have any problems showing up consistently to work 7:30-4:30?" results in them talking about their church for five minutes.

I've definitely interviewed people that were high on meth/crack/coke. My favorite was the guy that demanded he get the job, at the end of the interview. I was interviewing like three other people, I told him I'd know after that. But that wasn't good enough, he wanted to know then. When I told him that him that all the yelling and cussing and demanding he got the job disqualified him, he let the cusses fly like Mussolini on the wall.