A few weeks ago, a UK woman named Olivia Bland caught a bus to a job interview.
It was for a travel software company, and Olivia was nervous.
Two hours later, Olivia found herself at a bus stop in tears, shocked and distressed by what she had just encountered.
So, what happened in between?
It would seem Olivia was subjected to what has been termed the ‘stress interview‘; a situation designed to intimidate, upset, embarrass and provoke an interviewee.
The theory is that the stress interview tests resilience, particularly for the ‘snowflake’ millennial generation who have a reputation of falling to pieces in the face of a crisis.
The young woman said, via Twitter, that she was humiliated by the company’s CEO. She says she was told why she “wasn’t good enough,” called an underachiever, and was asked excessively personal questions.
“I would like to thank you for the offer, but I have decided to decline,” Olivia wrote in an email that has since gone viral.
“The interview process yesterday was very uncomfortable for me. I understand the impact that Craig was trying to have, but nobody should come out of a job interview feeling so upset that they cry at the bus stop.
“There is something very off to me about a man who tries his best to intimidate and assert power over a young woman, and who continues to push even when he can see that he’s making somebody uncomfortable to the point of tears.
“I’m not going through that again, in any capacity. I suppose I’m supposed to feel privileged enough to be good enough for the job. I don’t.”
She later likened the “brutal interview” to “being sat in a room with my abusive ex”.
Sophia*, 29, experienced a stress interview first hand in Sydney last year.
She had applied for a job at a large media organisation, and was through to the final round of interviews, with two of the most senior people in the business.
We discussed the ‘stress interview’ on this week’s episode of Mamamia Out Loud. Post continues below.
“I knew what it was within the first five minutes,” Sophia said.
“No questions were prepared, there was some judgement about my employment history, and they were dismissive of the skills that I had acquired.”
She was required to put together a portfolio which took her more than a full day of work, that the interviewers refused to glance at.
Sophia casually mentioned at the beginning of the interview that she had a cold, and one of the interviewers deliberately sat at the other end of the room, and mentioned a number of times that he was worried she’d get him sick.
Phone calls were answered, and both were distracted and impatient.
“I felt insignificant, incompetent, inexperienced, stupid, dumb, like they were doing me a favour,” Sophia said.
As soon as she walked out of the interview, she cried, but soon realised she could “never work for a company like that”.
“I knew that if I felt like that in the interview, then a bad day at work would look really awful.”
Sophia decided to send an email, polite and respectful, letting them know that she would like to withdraw her application.
They replied, informing her that they were moments away from offering her the position. The team had been incredibly impressed.
At that point, however, there was nothing they could do to convince her to take the job. Sophia knew she was at odds with the culture, and had been interviewing them as much as they had been interviewing her.
Months on, Sophia says she will never work somewhere that uses techniques like the stress interview in recruitment.
“Interviewing is a time when you’re going to make yourself vulnerable, put yourself out there and essentially sell who you are,” she said. “Being nervous and feeling pressure is part of the human condition. The stress interview eliminates any hope of bringing on someone that is going to care about your brand and live out its values. Businesses and people don’t work in black and white.”
The way to ‘win’ a stress interview is relatively simple.
Stay calm. Deal with it.
But the question employers might want to ask themselves is if a non-responsive candidate, who is content with being insulted and ridiculed, is really someone they want on their team.
Sensitivity, emotional intelligence and self respect are qualities that are much needed in any workplace.
To weed them out during recruitment is surely a mistake.
This story originally appeared in Mamamia’s Deep Dive newsletter, written by Clare and Jessie Stephens. You can subscribe to Deep Dive right here.
Top Comments
I would never do a stress interview. That strikes me as just antisocial.
There's an important distinction between how someone can feel and how someone can be made to feel that I think hiring managers need to understand. We should not try to ensure that people are made to feel stupid or inadequate. We may press certain limits that *might* lead people to question their knowledge.
The one time I was made to feel stupid during an interview it was entirely unintentional. I was asked about a problem that was so far out of my expertise that I simply had nothing to offer. I didn't feel put down. I just felt like there was so much more to learn. The difference is that the interviewer periodically said that he didn't expect me to have direct knowledge. So I did my best to reason through the problems and it was a good fit.
Fast forward. I now conduct interviews. I often try to ask questions outside of the candidate's expertise because what I get out of it is how they approach unusual problems. Outstanding employees will admit to a lack of knowledge and still try to solve the problem. Our job is to offer some reassurance that it is ok if this is outside of the candidate's knowledge and also see how they respond to that reassurance. But I work in a business where the technical challenges are extraordinary and so we need to find people who can face very scary unknown situations without too many problems.
Some interviewers think too much about themselves no matter how big the company is and they forget that the person sitting opposite are here for an opportunity and its mutual. No employer is doing any favour to anyone in the world by hiring someone. Finding a company fit can be done in much better ways than intimidation. Being personally affected having been interviewed by one of the biggest brands, I feel its time companies need to respect and evaluate candidates through better methods.
There are more subtle versions of this too. I interviewed at a company a few years ago. It was a programming job. Feedback from them was that I thought before programming and that was bad. My thinking was that "this is how you get a 2 million line Perl codebase for your web site!" So the lack of fit was mutual....