Person Shows Up For Interview Only To Be Met With Hostility And Forced To Wait 30 Minutes, Decides To Leave

Various business publications today are full of interviews with managers of different companies, big and small, totally upset by how difficult it is to find a good employee nowadays, and how many important vacancies remain unfilled. Of course, this problem exists, but companies often provoke it themselves.

Yes, we are talking about job interviews, and the internet is also full of stories about how unprofessional HR managers and bosses sometimes behave when negotiating with job seekers. And sometimes, in order to actually get to even an already scheduled interview, you have to go through a real quest.

For instance, this story appeared a few days ago on the Reddit Antiwork community, and as of today has around 11.2K upvotes and nearly 900 different comments. The internet is quite divided over this, so let's just try to figure everything out together.

So, the author of the original post says that they recently went to an interview scheduled by the manager at 1pm at their local harbor freight. As the jobseeker recalls, they showed up a few minutes early, and one of the employees in the company's office said that they would have to wait a few minutes. The original poster didn't see this as a problem, as they had deliberately arrived a few minutes early anyway.

But time passed - and the HR manager never showed up. After 15 minutes of waiting, the OP decided to check with another manager when the interview would begin, but received just the answer that "everything will start any minute!" After another 15 minutes, the applicant decided that their time was more valuable than trying to get a job at that very company, so they got up and left, stating that "waiting 30 minutes for an interview scheduled by someone in the store was unprofessional."

The original poster then claims that they were greeted with hostility by the other manager, who explained that the HR employee was in a meeting with her own manager at that time, and this was the main reason for such a delay. But according to the author of the post, they did not consider this reason to be valid enough to delay the interview for half an hour.

On the other hand, the OP further admits that on the same day, they attended one more job interview and accepted an offer from another company. So it is quite possible that the time gap between two interviews turned out to be very small, and if the first was delayed, then the jobseeker would have simply been late for the second. In addition, the author of the post admits that this was not their dream job at all - otherwise, of course, they would have waited much longer to get that position.

"The situation looks rather uncomfortable to me," says Alexey Shkurat, founder and CEO of Peach art studio, who was asked by Bored Panda for a comment on the story. "Of course, it's unpleasant when you are kept waiting, but this person themselves admits they were explained the reason for the recruiter's delay, and the company was perhaps interested in attracting them as a new employee."

“However, it doesn’t look that professional to keep a recruiter at a meeting when she has a job interview scheduled. For a prospective employee, it looks like they are not valued in advance, and the value of the employer in the eyes of the applicant certainly falls. I don’t know how important this meeting was for the company, however, the HR manager should probably try to leave it and still conduct an interview - albeit late, but not for so long. In any case, the external image of the company suffered," Alexey notes.

Many people in the comments also supported the original poster, arguing that making a jobseeker wait half an hour and probably longer (if they hadn't left) is overkill. Thus, as some of the commenters note, the company undervalues prospective employees straight from the interview stage, clearly demonstrating that people are not so respected here. And, of course, the commenters praised the OP for showing strong will and are glad that they found a new job as well.

However, it should be noted right away that the situation that happened to the author of this story is far from the most outrageous. For example, no one managed to even meet the hero of this post of ours, who showed up for an interview at a fairly large hospital. And this jobseeker managed to get an interview, but when the company representatives found out that they were unemployed at that time, their salary offer immediately decreased. In any case, we're glad the original poster has found a new job, and besides, we're already looking forward to your own comments below this post.