The candidate lost the job before anyone asked him a question. He walked into the building, approached the front desk, and was dismissive to the woman sitting behind it. She greeted him. He barely made eye contact. She tried to make conversation and got nothing back.
She was the hiring manager.
A coworker who watched the whole thing unfold wrote about it on Reddit as u/sawta2112 in a post that went on to collect more than 46,000 upvotes. “Today, a candidate blew his interview in the first 5 minutes after he entered the building,” they wrote. The man hadn’t set foot in the conference room yet. He had, according to the post, treated the woman at the desk “like she was beneath him.”
Socially anxioys or just plain rude?
She called him back to the conference room anyway, and told him why he wasn’t getting the job. Every person on the team, she explained, was valuable and worthy of respect. The role was client-facing, where being warm and approachable was most of the work.
The obvious explanation for his rude behavior is nerves. Plenty of people go stiff and monosyllabic in a lobby because they’re running answers in their head, and that isn’t a character flaw. The poster had already considered that and rejected it.
“It wasn’t just lack of eye contact,” they wrote. “He was openly rude and treated her like she was beneath him. When he thought he was talking to the decision-maker, his personality totally changed. Suddenly he was friendly, open, relaxed. So I don’t think this was a case of social anxiety.”
The comments were filled with people who’d been on either side of this scenario. One person got chatty with a stranger in the elevator on the way up to an interview and found out later it was the company’s CEO, and got the job. Another described a system from the paper-resume era, where whoever accepted a walk-in resume at the front desk could draw a small horizontal line in the corner to flag that the person had been rude.
Making an impression
This story comes from one office and one account, and there’s no confirming the details. But the principle behind it—that how someone treats a person with no apparent power over them tells you more than a scheduled interview will—shows up in places where the names are attached.
Luis von Ahn, the CEO of Duolingo, has described a CFO candidate who looked excellent on paper and interviewed well and still didn’t get an offer. “It turned out that they were pretty mean to their driver from the airport to the office, and that made us not hire them,” he said on The Burnouts podcast. “Our belief is if they’re going to be mean to the driver, they’re probably going to be mean to other people, particularly people under them.”
Trent Innes, then former managing director of Xero Australia, described on The Venture Podcast with Lambros Photios walking candidates to the office kitchen for a drink at the start of an interview, then watching whether they carry the empty cup back at the end. He’s said he’d hire almost anyone who does.
The advice that came out of the thread wasn’t really about interviews at all. As one commenter put it, the trick is to be a kind, mannerly person all the time, and then you never have to worry about faking it.
